Decluttering Technology | Ep 042

Kacie: What's up guys? We are really excited about these, this series, this summer series that we have going on. It might even go into the fall. I don't know. I'm just absolutely loving the short. Just here's, here's a punch of information. Now go run 

John: with it. Yeah. You know, 'cause we're finding out so much, um, so many topics out there, so much trending, um, um, focus right now for small businesses that, you know, it's kind of like easy.

We can come in and we're like, hey. This is what we're struggling with right now. Let's just talk about it. Yeah. So that makes it fun. And also it's stuff that we can utilize, like this is a lot of people's downtime, but it's it's time that, um, you can take a step back and. Look at your business and say, okay, what kind of adjustments can I make to finish off the year strong?

So it's fun having these kinds of conversations, for sure. 

Kacie: Yeah, I think it's cool to take a bite out of the elephant too. Take a 

John: bite outta that elephant. Just one 

Kacie: little bite. I love it. Just one little bite. We don't have to eat the whole thing today. Just one little bite. These shorts are very helpful for that.

So our goal with all of these shorts is to give you just one snippet, one snippet of things, and then you have an entire week to work on that snippet. Right. 

John: Yeah. So next week when you're hearing the next snippet, we're gonna hold you accountable to making sure you accomplished the previous week's snippet.

Yes.

Kacie: The Business Project podcast 

John: business can be

Kacie: complicated. We break it down to regular people like 

John: us can understand and find success. I'm John Crespo, accountant and consultants. 

Kacie: I'm Casey Bryant, marketer and event planner. If you run a business or want to run a business,

John: welcome to the show.

Kacie: Let's do it. All right, so today we're going into decluttering your technology, 

John: spring cleaning in the summer of all of your apps in the summer. Ooh. We're gonna spring clean in the summer. We're a little late with spring cleaning, but it's never too late. 

Kacie: Never too late. Yeah. And you had mentioned when we were preparing for the show that it's a great opportunity.

Um, to get ready for taxes too, right? Yes. Get all your tax stuff cleaned up. Yep. Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand. I think so too. So we're gonna talk about cleaning your phone. We're gonna talk about cleaning your computer, and then we're gonna talk about getting rid of all of the apps that you're not using and your subscriptions and like, let's just, let's just spend a week.

Mm-hmm. Just put an hour or half an hour aside a day and just clean 

John: it up. Yeah. I mean, think about it. You know, we spend a year. Always finding something new that we can use for our business. This is the next best thing. This app is the next best thing. It's gonna take my business to the next level. We use it for a month and we forget about it and next thing you know, it's building up on our phone or it's building up on our computers and it's, it's.

Stuff that we're paying for on a monthly basis and we kind of forget about it. Mm-hmm. It's time to take a look at that kind of stuff. 

Kacie: I have a couple of those that still send me notifications every morning and I just swipe the notifications and I'm like, why? Why don't I just delete it? It's just brain power that I don't need to be using.

Yeah. It's clutter. 

John: It's clutter. It's clutter. Yeah. It's clutter. And I think, uh, if you're looking at how you fill the jug right, with, um, stuff to focus on, you wanna fill it with the big rocks. Do you ever see that kind of, uh, YouTube video mm-hmm. Or video out there where they're, they're telling you what to con concentrate on.

You concentrate on the big rocks, um, before you concentrate on the little rocks. Mm-hmm. Right? Because those are what takes up the most space. So you wanna make sure that, that what, what it's taking up the most space is what gets the most concentration. The little rocks they fill in the cracks, you know?

So when it comes to these, um, programs, when it comes to running your business, you want to make sure that you have the right tools. And not all this little stuff. Cluttering up your space, cluttering up your time and taking your money. 

Kacie: Yeah. So great. Yeah. So you're saving time and money and brain power and all the things by just taking this week, 30 minutes a day.

An hour a day. I know it seems like a lot, but it's just a week and you probably spend that amount of time scrolling on your social media apps. Yeah. Instead of scrolling, let's clean. Yeah. 

John: You know a good way to get started on that, how run a profit and loss. Hmm. Okay. Right? Yeah, because a, a profit and loss is, well, you know what your business is where the revenue, it tells you what revenue is coming in and it tells you what expenses are going out.

So if you run a profit and loss, and you look at the expense side, you know, instead of looking at the revenue side to say, okay, how much money's coming in right now, just take a look at the expense side and say, where is my money going? And then you can drill in on your profit and loss and see what, what it is.

So you can drill down to the actual, um, name category of the expense and you can see if it's really something that you need or something that you don't. So it's a good opportunity to clean up, you know, your profit and loss statement and make sure that you're not spending money you don't need to spend.

Yeah, that's 

Kacie: great. I, I guarantee you, we all have a lot of apps running in the background subscriptions that we're paying, we're for that we don't even need. And that stuff all adds up. At the end of the year, you'll see if you run that profit and loss, you'll see how big of an impact that'll 

John: have. Yeah. If you don't have the ability to run a profit and loss, use your spreadsheet.

Mm-hmm. Get your bank statement right. Get your monthly bank statement and go through your bank statement and, you know, line by line. Um, you know, that's boring stuff, but it's, sometimes it's a, it's, if we're decluttering, if we're looking to spring clean, Look at your bank statement, go line by line and say, alright, what's all this coming outta my bank account?

Kacie: Right. That's how I do it. Yeah. That's less overwhelming for me. I did that actually last week. 

John: Oh yeah. So you started spring cleaning. 

Kacie: I did. Well, because we're switching websites. Yeah. And so I had to make sure that all of the transactions coming out from the old website were done. 

John: Right. Yeah. So that's a, so now you, you probably.

I notice some things that you're spending money on. Yes. And you're like, ah, let's go. Why get rid of this? I, you know, this. Think, think about, um, what is king when it comes to business? Um, money. Money, cash flow. Right? Right. Cash flow. So the more cash you're able to keep in your account, The better it is, right?

Mm-hmm. Because then you can deploy that cash in areas that you really needed. Use it as your army. Use it as your army. Yeah. Right. Deploy that. Because if you are going through your bank statement line by line, you're gonna see, I can save $20 here, I can save $15 here. And it, it adds up. 

Kacie: It does. I'd be interesting.

You guys go do that this week and then come back to the video or, Send us a message on social media and let us know how much you saved by doing 

John: that. Yeah. You'd be surprised. You probably save a couple hundred dollars a month. You're like, wow. Yeah. What can we use this for now? I have some 

Kacie: ideas. 

John: Yeah, exactly.

You know, hey, you know, if you need, if you don't need that couple hundred dollars that you saved, you could send it our way. We can help you. Yeah. 

Kacie: Yeah. Yes, this podcast is free. We take donations. That's right. That's right. I'm just kidding. All right, so we talked about decluttering your apps. Mm-hmm. Um, let's continue with the phone, um, the phone theme.

Yes. And so some other things that you can declutter on your phone is your screens. You know, you can, I have my phone right here. Um, and look, look at my joy. Hold on. I gotta show you guys my little joy, joy. Look at that cute little pig. I don't know if you can see it. She's my little baby. Um, okay, so if you go to your screens, like, look at that.

Look how messy that is. Yeah. We don't, that's not good. So you can go in. I just showed you guys my life by the way. Um, you can go in and like clean these up, create folders with. Categories, you know, put all your bank stuff together and all your social media stuff together and create folders with fun pictures.

And like, this is overwhelming. I've, I've been putting this off 'cause it's, it's overwhelming. Yeah. 

John: Oh, I look at my wife's phone all the time. And I'm like, how do you find what you need? Yeah. My wife downloads every app you could think of. Oh, goodness. And then, um, she's probably, if she listens to this, she's gonna be like, well, what are you talking about me for?

But, you know, because it's, I'm looking at it and I'm like, how do you find what you need? Like, there's so much stuff on your phone and it's time consuming. Mm-hmm. Right. So if your goal is to save time and save money, Then, you know, putting your stuff in the right places, getting rid of stuff you don't need is going to really help you get that kind of process down.

Kacie: Yeah. We say this often. Simple is hard. Yeah. Simple is really hard and sitting down and cleaning up and keeping it organized is hard. Yeah. But it does like doing the work on the front end, just like a lot of things in business helps save you a lot in the backend. Yeah. 

John: Yeah, I'd rather be watching YouTube videos than worrying about cleaning up my phone.

Right. We were just talking about earlier how like guys love YouTube videos. Yeah. Um, I would be, I love to, I'd rather just watch a YouTube video, especially after work, um, than worry about cleaning. But it's something that, you know, if we take just an hour. You know, of the month, take an hour and go through our stuff and clean it up.

That just may, that'll make your life so much better. Yeah, 

Kacie: I agree. Steps. So you can do it. Take the steps. Yeah, take the steps. Let's take some action. So we talked about cleaning up your subscriptions. We talked about cleaning up the desktop of your phone. Is that even what it's called? Your screens of your phone.

And then we're gonna talk about, the last thing is cleaning up your computer, decluttering your computer technology. Yeah. 

John: That's overwhelming. I think the biggest ones, the biggest ones that suffer with that. Are you Apple users? Hey, why? Yeah, because Apple doesn't, Apple's memory, right? Yeah. Their storage is not, you know, not, not like a pc.

Pc. You have terabytes, two terabytes, three terabytes of storage, and you know it, you're not really gonna. Feel the effects, but Apple, you know, they're kind of stingy with their storage. Right? 

Kacie: They are stingy with their storage. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's, it's not necessarily even the storage, it's the going, opening up my computer and seeing five bazillion things.

Mm-hmm. On my computer. I'm gonna tell him my husband. We got a new work computer and apparently he was using my Microsoft account. And so when we were setting up this new work computer from a new employee, it pulled all of the stuff that was on his desktop. Oh wow. And. I mean, I couldn't even, I was like immediately overwhelmed.

It's like a million folders on the desktop. Um, and I'm like, man, how do you even operate like this? It just feels so much better to just take an hour, go through, delete, yeah. Pictures you don't use, delete, um, folders you don't use anymore and clean it up. Organize it all into folders. Makes it so much easier.

John: Yeah, I think I was, I was a culprit of that when I worked for a company. Right. My, uh, my computer, my desktop screen had everything on there and I was, I, it is overwhelming 'cause then you can't find what you're looking for. I'm pretty good with mine now. I do have, I keep folders of, you know, different things and everything is in a folder.

So I literally, you might see 10 folders on my desktop screen and that's it. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. I, it's just find a system. I learned how, how, how that struggle was not fun. No. Time is money. If you could find something quickly, then you can get it done faster. 

Kacie: Exactly, yeah. And it's just is less overwhelming for your brain.

We do a lot of, you know, graphics and videos and so I feel like my desktop is, I, I, some of us are gonna have to spend more time than others. Yeah, because if you're not doing a whole lot of that type of thing, it might be easier, but if you're. Like me and doing a bazillion graphics and videos a day and you've got 'em everywhere.

It could be longer than 

John: a week. Oh, I can imagine. I can imagine what your desktop looks like. 

Kacie: It's not too bad, but it's, it's getting a little bad, 

John: but you guys do do a lot of videos and stuff like that, so that can, that can definitely be something. But, um, putting the focus in just like we said, an hour a month just to declutter.

Is is, you know, liberating. Believe it or not, it is. 

Kacie: Feels good when you're done. Yeah. Yeah, it does. 

John: Try it 

Kacie: out. All right, so you guys got it. We're gonna take some action. You guys are gonna save some money. You're gonna let us know how much you saved and we are done. That's today. Yeah. 

John: If you save a couple hundred dollars a month by getting rid of some subscriptions, the next step is figuring out.

What can you use that money for to really, truly better your business? Yeah, so think about it. Think about it. See you next week. 

Kacie: Y'all. Have a good 

John: one. Bye.