010: Simple Secrets to Eliminate Overload, Save Time & be Productive – Audrey Thomas

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Tony Maree Torrey 0:00
With what you’re doing with all your productivity work is you are actually giving us back our most precious resource which is time

Audrey Thomas 0:07
and my goal is still to treat others in a way that I’m leaving them better than I found them. Welcome to

Tony Maree Torrey 0:13
the legacy in the making Show. I’m your host Ellie’s foremost Success Coach Tony Maree Torrey, I interview leaders and influencers who have gone beyond the superficial markers of success and claimed true fulfillment by leveraging their positions to create positive and profitable changes in their businesses and beyond. They share their stories and offer real world boots on the ground experience. That translates into practical advice to apply to your own journey. I invite you to this injection of wisdom and inspiration so you can prevail and leave your own lasting legacy. I am here today with Audrey Thomas, also known as organized Organized Audrey. Welcome. It’s so good to have you here.

Audrey Thomas 1:05
Thank you so much, Johnny marine great to be your guest.

Tony Maree Torrey 1:08
Well, let me tell our audience a little bit more about you and then we’ll dig into some juicy conversation. So Audrey has been teaching and entertaining audiences to be more organized and productive for over 20 years. She’s an author and a speaker and a productivity consultant, which is one of the reasons why I invited her on the show today. Because Don’t we all need to be organized and productive. She said, don’t we though, I know that better than anyone. Audrey’s client list is very impressive. She has worked for Royal Bank of Canada and Boeing and the million dollar round table. She is the past president of the National Speakers Association of Minnesota, which is where she is coming from today. She’s a certified speaking professional. And less than 12% of speakers in the world are awarded this credential. So she is a rare breed and well and truly worth listening to. She lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and her hobbies include gardening, Target, shooting, and deleting email, oh my gosh, like I saw want to hear more about the deleting email component because I am still a smidge traumatized by email from my decades in the corporate world where on so many levels that ran my life. So tell us a little bit more about yourself, Audrey, and how it is that you came to be a productivity consultant?

Audrey Thomas 2:43
Well, it was my husband who in the early years of our marriage pointed out that I tended to think about things not like other people. And he was trying to pay me a compliment. And that I would tend to always look several steps ahead. Because I tend to think of systems and formats as it relates to how efficient Am I going to be. So if I’m standing in line somewhere, I’m kind of watching from behind the scenes like, Okay, this is how we could redo things like we could make this a lot more efficient if we did it this way. And so that is kind of how I got started just being able to spot some of those processes. And then people started asking me to teach them about how to be more organized in the home, and then how to be more organized in the office. And I got started speaking before email, so I know I’m dating myself.

Tony Maree Torrey 3:38
I’m in the same category.

Audrey Thomas 3:41
And at that time, paper was an issue. So how can we be more organized at our in our offices with all the stacks of paper, and then when email came along, I started doing training and teaching on email efficiency and realize that that really became a passion for me because it’s so impacted. Every single employee, we were given this great new tool called email, but nobody was given a manual that said, this is how you use it. And even to this day, as I pull my audiences, I’ll ask people, how many of you have children that are now using email? And the youngest I’ve seen is kindergarten, and it’s driven by the schools. So my next question is okay, for those of you with young kids that are using email now, how much training did they get? And I know we’re going to be talking about decision making here shortly. But when fails, every single email that comes to you is the decision waiting to be made.

Tony Maree Torrey 4:35
Oh, absolutely. And I do have to admit that I am one of those people that really does not enjoy doing email. And a lot of that comes from decades in the corporate world, thousands and thousands of emails coming through because I managed global teams and so they would come through at all times of the day. And it was really, really hard to keep up with all the demands and essential To be truth be told Audrey, my main system was don’t respond to anything until someone sends at least a second email because that means that it probably actually is important. And they might actually need my attention.

I handled the overload, but I’m sure you have many better ways that you could teach.

Audrey Thomas 5:28
I don’t recommend that.

If you start taking a look at your inbox, as the place where you need to be in decision making mode, you’ll be way more successful with managing it. So as those emails come into your inbox, if you just receive, let’s say, 18 emails, tell yourself I have 18 decisions to make, and start getting into that decision making mode. So you make a decision about an email after you read it before you go on to the next one. I will tell people using monopoly terms, I’ll tell people do not pass go do not collect $200, you have made a decision on the email that you just opened and read. And when to start getting in the habit of making a decision on what to do with this email. And which by the way, more than 50% of the emails you receive that you read, can be deleted immediately. Mm hmm. And yeah, here’s here’s how people are getting jammed up. They’re reading this email. And then instead of deleting it, which they know they can they just immediately go to the next email to read it, and then the next email, and then the next email. Mm hmm. They don’t delete those that they know that they can. And at the end of the day, they’ve got all these emails that they bred, but they haven’t made any decisions. And those decisions add up to clutter. So clutter is the result of delayed decisions.

Tony Maree Torrey 6:53
And it was that comment that I heard you make because one of my specialties is in teaching my clients how to make excellent decisions and how to access really their full bodied wisdom, so they can use all their thinking faculties to make a very wise choices. When you made that comment about the clutter component, I had literally just lived an experience of that. A very dear friend who’s also a client, he’s a very high level at a large private corporation. He’s the director of operations. So we both know that he’s organized and that he can make really good decisions. But he was moving. And he was actually moving within the same complex. So it was literally just the let’s take stuff across the street to another building. And so I offered to help him out just to kind of get the ball rolling. I mean, he was going to do the big stuff. But it was hysterical, because most of what I helped him move was to closets full of paper grocery bags that had paperwork in them, that he had moved in to his other place three years earlier. And now we were just transferring

into other closets into any new lodge or when

Audrey Thomas 8:11
I first came across this grocery sack method probably 25 years ago, as I was doing some one on one consulting with some people in their homes. And this one couples said that their method for managing paper was they would have stacks in on the kitchen counter where they sorted their mail. And then if they got a phone call from somebody like their mother in law, and she said, Hey, I’m going to be stopping over and they didn’t want the mother in law to see all their paper, they would take a grocery sack, all the paper in the grocery sack, and then they would throw the grocery sack in a closet. And then they would have a nice visit with the mother in law she would leave, they would not go back and get the sack they would leave the sack in the closet until they filled another sack. And yet every sack was filled with what decisions waiting to be made right on pieces of paper. Right. But because they weren’t making those decisions, it was a lot of clutter. They had been doing the grocery sack method for more than 15 years. Wow. Yeah, their entire their whole basement was filled with Grocery sacks. And when we went through all that paper, we found over $10,000 worth of uncashed checks and tax refunds. One of the exercises I like to tell people about is it’s really an analogy. So think about in January, everybody who’s saying I’m going to go to the gym, if the gym is open, and I’m going to go get bit I’m going to I’m going to start exercising and those first two to four weeks your whole body is hurting because you have used muscles that you have not used in ages and you’re sore and you really hurt. And I like in making decisions related to a decision making muscle that we have up in our heads. And if you haven’t used it in a while it’s going to be rusty and it’s going to be really scary. slow to get it going. But once you start making decisions, you condition that muscle, and it’s not sore anymore. And it’s much easier to use and your decisions come faster. I recently coached a salesman, he was in one of my sessions on email. And he emailed me afterwards. And he said, this whole premise about making decisions about my email really hit home because I have thousands of emails sitting in my inbox. And he said, I’m going to report back to you in a few weeks to see how things are going. And so he put on his decision making cap, if you will. And he started making decisions one email at a time. And he emailed me not even a week later, and he said, I have gone from more than 4000 emails down to 50 in my inbox, because I just simply had to learn how to make those decisions. He said, Now is the emails come into my inbox, and I’m reading them, I’m telling myself, I have to make a decision on what to do with this email before I go to the next one, whether it be deleting it or filing it, or responding or scheduling something on your calendar, we have a lot of decisions that we can make around emails, the key is to be aware of it. And then to do it before you go on to that next female.

Tony Maree Torrey 11:16
I love that that is so fantastic. I hearken back to this person that I was telling you about earlier, it’s like part of what I know is happening for him is he has a very high responsibility position. And he is he works long hours, and he is going to work and making a ton of decisions over the course of his day. So by the time he gets home, he’s exhausted because there really is a thing called decision fatigue. I don’t know if you know this, there was a really interesting study that happens quite a few years ago now. But it was conducted by Stanford and Ben Gurion University hope I pronounced that correctly. It’s a weird word. And they actually studied parole Board’s decision making capabilities. And it was fascinating because they studied 1100 parole board decisions over the course of a year. And they discovered that their level of decision fatigue was actually what impacted whether a parolee went in for three or not, can you imagine what it must be like knowing that you’re coming up in front of the parole board, and that board chances for a bid for freedom are as whimsical as the time of day that you’re going to come in front of them? It’s almost as if we have a decision making quota. So once we hit that quota, or done, we’re spent, we don’t want to do anything more, right? And yeah,

Audrey Thomas 12:44
yeah. And there’s times where my husband and I will be having a conversation in the evening, where we need to come to consensus or make a decision. And there’s times where I just say to him, You know what, I have nothing left in my brain right now to process them, does that make a decision? So let me sleep on it. And let’s make a decision first thing in the morning, and that might just be something really unimportant to regard the survey that you mentioned, or the research that you mentioned about the parole board? I think it’s important for people to recognize that when we have really important decisions to make, we should make them early in the day or at least after we’re well rested.

Tony Maree Torrey 13:17
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then there are other things, there are other techniques and methodologies that you can employ, which is part of what I teach my clients where they can recharge their batteries, so to speak. So as they transition from work, to going home, a lot of my clients now they have rituals that they undertake before they walk into the house. And that’s really good for their relationships as well, because you come in the door, with your well emptied, what kind of everything’s a decision really isn’t even coming down to the words that are about to come out your mouth or whether you have your spouse or close important things. And of course, obviously at the moment, almost everyone’s working from home. But the same thing applies you come out of your office space or whatever way you decide interacting with your family. If you have not replenished the well before you do that the chances that you’re going to be in reptilian brain and more reactive and more exhausted a huge like in the study that they were talking about. Literally, if the judges and parole board members made a decision in the morning when they were rested. It was a 70% positive parole if they made the decision just before lunch when they were hungry, or after lunch when they were sleepy or at the end of the day. The chances of someone getting involved diminished radically. So we these are things that we need to know and we need to be aware of and supermarket chains and car retailers they know about this. That’s the reason why all the candy bars are at the checkout aisle because of you walk through the grocery store and you’ll make a ton of tiny decisions like you know what kind of vegetables and like To get new start out, you get all the things that are unhealthy, right? assuming you’re already tired and exhausted when you go in there. And then you get to the checkout and your capacity to resist. making those choices over the candy bar diminishes significantly. But the good news is that there are some some things that you can do to, as I mentioned, replenish the well, and

sure, yeah,

Tony Maree Torrey 15:22
yeah. What do you do to replenish your? Well, I mean, obviously, a good night’s sleep, like, you know, you recognize when you’ve hit that wall, and and you allow yourself to have some rest and recuperate, do you have any other things that you employ that help you reduce?

Audrey Thomas 15:37
Yes, if I’m, if I’ve been at my desk for a long time, a movement is really important to me, I have a desk that is on a hydraulic system. So I have a treadmill as part of my desk. So I can move over, just slide over and get on my treadmill and walk just raise my desk a little bit. So that that’s important. Sometimes I simply get outside for some fresh air and walk around the block. I mean, it’s a fast walk. And I can do it eight minutes, and I can walk around the area and just get some fresh air. So that is really good. Sometimes I just need a complete change of pace. So no computer, no television, no media, nothing. And maybe I just sit and stare out the window, my my house backs up to a nature preserve. Sometimes I’m just looking at the trees and the birds and maybe sitting on the deck just just to do some deep breathing, all those things are something different than staring at my computer screen. Mm hmm. And hunched over, you know, I kind of aware of my writing my posture and that sort of thing. Maybe I get up and I don’t want to go outside for a walk. I live in Minnesota. So maybe the weather is really cold or really bad. But maybe I just get on the floor and do some stretches. And do a five, I have five and 10 minute routines, some videos that I have access to online. So maybe I just do that. And it’s amazing when you get your heart pumping, how that feeds your brain. And then I can go back to my desk, replenished. Any of those things movement, a healthy snack, meditation, doing like not looking at anything electronic. That’s, that’s pretty important. Yeah, even means listening to a podcast does nothing electronic. So I’m not taking in anything. I’m not hearing seeing maybe I’m just sitting on my deck looking at the woods.

Tony Maree Torrey 17:20
I love what you were saying about all the things that you can do to bring oxygen into your system, because that’s definitely one of the main ones. I had a client A number of years ago that I was working with. And we were actually working through a past traumatic experience of hers where she had actually two near death experiences within one event. And she was scuba diving, and nearly drowned. Because their tanks run out. It was her first time and the people that were in charge of the organization of it, her buddy had become distracted and didn’t notice that she was in distress. And so then they pulled her up to so she nearly died then and then they pulled her up. And they pulled her up too quickly. And she had the bins but no one did anything about that as well. So so there was a lot of trauma to be digested from this event. And she was she was 19 years old when this happened. She was now in her late 40s. And it had been carried with her all this time in her body. And it got triggered when she took her own daughter to take scuba lessons. And then she had a massive panic attack. So So we worked through all that and how to what was happening as we were going through the stages of taking the stress off the trauma, she kept on holding her breath on the exhale. Like she literally had no oxygen in there. And I was reminding her to breathe. And finally towards the end of this process, she perked up and she went, Oh, I get it. You can have inspiration without respiration.

Audrey Thomas 18:52
That was her connection.

Tony Maree Torrey 18:54
That was her connection. And it completely makes sense. One of the simplest things you can do literally is take three deep belly

Audrey Thomas 19:03
breaths, and hold it. I like to hold it and then slowly release it. Yeah,

Tony Maree Torrey 19:09
yeah, exactly. And then another thing that you can do that I learned from brain scientists who deal with people who have concussions and severe brain injuries, is that if you close your eyes, and you keep them closed for two minutes, and you have to time it so you don’t cheat, right, because two minutes actually sometimes can feel like a really long time. So you close your eyes for two minutes. And that actually helps reset your brain. Oh, and even even more powerful is what they call cupping. So you actually literally put your hands over your eyes, and you use the palms to almost create kind of a slight sense of suction. And I’m not sure and make sure that there’s no light there and you can keep your eyes open and do that that way. And those are two other really just very simple, quick, restorative things. So You as a legacy maker as a founding CEO, or someone who’s working their way in that direction. These are fantastic, simple ways that you can use to just recharge your batteries.

Okay, excellent.

Tony Maree Torrey 20:13
Well, Odoo This is so great hearing all these things that you’re talking about. And I’m curious now, because legacy in the making show is all about changing the world through business. So if you were to identify a problem in the world, perhaps a larger global problem, or something that you feel is your life’s mission to solve? What would that be? Oh, my goodness, hmm.

Audrey Thomas 20:37
I feel like there’s so much wrong in the world right now. So that I just said to my husband yesterday happened to run across an old video footage on YouTube of Ronald Reagan, when he was running for president. And there was this level of congeniality between the competitors for the President of the United States, what they had in common was they both loved the United States and cared deeply about leading this country. But they had different points of view on how they would do that. But it was nothing vindictive, it was nothing hate filled. And I just when I turn the news on right now, which I don’t do very often anymore, it’s just the opposite of that. And I feel like we’re missing kindness. And we’re missing the fact that we can, we can agree to disagree. And we can do it politely with kindness, knowing that we have the same common denominator, in which case, like, let’s say, it’s politics, you care about your country. And so I don’t care what side of the aisle you’re on, I just feel like civility and kindness has been thrown out the window. And it actually grieves me, it makes me really sad. When I see how far we’ve gone with that, and I pray that I have opportunities to show kindness to others that might be on a phone call, or a zoom call, it might be when I’m running an errand at the post office or the grocery store, or a while I’m out for a walk, and I happened to walk by a neighbor’s home and they’re outside working, and I can have a conversation with them. Because I think that is something that I see missing in this world. I love that it sounds like that’s a really important value for you that kindness, compassion components, we’re living through some pretty difficult times right now. And it is very easy for people to get caught up in their own sense of suffering around things and maybe lose that kindness factor and patience, compassion for others and compassion for themselves, you definitely embody that quality to me. And so good work. And thank you for bringing this up here. Because now that’s an opportunity for those of you who are listening in to consider that possibility for yourself today, today, my goal is still to treat others in a way that I’m leaving them better than I found them. And that is something that I learned from a mentor of mine years ago. And so I’m just trying to pass that on.

Tony Maree Torrey 23:08
Yes, I love that. And of course, with what you’re doing with all your productivity work is you are actually giving us back our most precious resource, which is time I’ve made and it gives us time to pause. I work with a lot of high achievers. And one of the things about people who are high achievers is that they have a tendency to point themselves in a direction and go there as fast as they possibly can. And it’s not always the direction that is really wisest for them. And sometimes they find themselves somewhere where it was just not really not, not their intention of where it was that they wanted to end 1000 tiny choices, right? Like, I get here, Tony Marie fouls and tiny choices, right, when we have more time to exercise that decision making muscle. And as you said, as as your muscle gets fitter, your ability to make spot on decisions rapidly enough uses that, especially if you have that time to pause where you allow yourself the space in the first place to regroup to recharge your batteries, and then your decision making superpowers are right on the money

Audrey Thomas 24:22
and the more decisions you’re making. And the better and faster you get at them, the less time you have to spend with the end result of not making decisions which is clutter. So think about how paralyzing it is for some people when they walk into a messy room. Mm hmm. Whether it be the kitchen or their office or their space, like their car or whatever. When you have all that mess and clutter around. It just weighs on you. It’s kind of like when you open up your inbox. And if you have thousands of emails, that’s what you’re faced with. So imagine every email as a piece of paper and it’s stacked on your desk, right? But when you start making decisions and you don’t have that clutter, then you’re faced with the room and the space and the joy, to be able to really enjoy a space, right? So you’re not bogged down with, oh, I’ve got 4572 emails in my inbox, or I’m supposed to host for the next holiday. And the dining room table is four feet high with stuff, right. And if you get in that habit of making decisions, then that energizes you to not only keep it that way, and keep making future decisions, but it energizes you to enjoy that space a lot more,

Tony Maree Torrey 25:35
just as you were bringing up the clutter before it reminded me of a story that our friends told me when I was in my 20s. And he his father had just passed away. And his father was very organized, but came from that generation where they didn’t throw anything out. And he said, as he went through his father’s basement, the most precious thing that he found, and he actually kept because he thought it was so funny, was this plastic bag that was labeled bits of string too short to be of any use.

Audrey Thomas 26:07
Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. That is very telling. Very telling a lot. Love it. I love that he kept it.

Tony Maree Torrey 26:16
Yes, because it encapsulated his relationship with his dad, I think it you know, in a way it reminded him of his dad, finding

good medicine. So he was organized, but he still couldn’t make that decision to throw things away. So I, I recommend that we ask ourselves some decisions on what can we what can we eliminate from our lives, that is the clutter whether it’s the inbox or your garage, or whatever it is, it’s going on. In some ways, we’ve been given a gift of time as the world has slowed down and it is an opportunity to clean up our stuff because I can guarantee that you will feel lighter. Once you do so I am going to approach my inbox in a new with your influence and that feels really empowering.

Audrey Thomas 27:07
Have your finger on that delete key Tony Murray. Yes,

Tony Maree Torrey 27:10
yes, it needs to get one out. Right.

Well, Audrey, you have shared so much great wisdom with us today. Where can people connect with you if they’d like to know more?

Audrey Thomas 27:21
Sure, they can find me on LinkedIn just with my name Audrey Thomas, and they contact me through my website, which is organized adri.com. Now there’s all kinds of free resources on my website as well. I send out a tip that goes out twice a month. It’s called my Monday moment and it’s designed to be read or watched as a video in three minutes or less. And we have a very loyal very loyal following on that. I’ve had that for years and people just love it. And then my youtube channel is the other besides LinkedIn YouTube as my other main social media and would encourage your listeners and viewers to go there and hit the

Tony Maree Torrey 27:58
subscribe button. Nice. And I would say video speed controller like I love that thing. I’ve got to the point where I if I listened to anything that normal speed now it just feels so good.

I love it.

Tony Maree Torrey 28:14
All right. Well, thank you so much, Audrey. I’m really looking forward to publishing this podcast and getting some great responses.

Audrey Thomas 28:20
Okay, take care Tony Maree Torrey.

Tony Maree Torrey 28:25
I’m glad you tuned in to the legacy in the making show. If you’re genuinely interested in creating positive change in your business or your life or on a more global scale, I invite you to connect with me at Tony murray.com. That’s Tony with a why Murray with two E’s. When you get there you’ll find the path to purpose master plan, the truly brilliant method to make sure you’re clear on why you’re here. This is the absolute critical foundation to honing your instincts and leaving a legacy you’ll be proud of. You can also find out about the innate wisdom Business Council which is an opportunity to evolve your vision in the company of like minded leaders and much much more. Thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and we’ll see you next time.