Transcription
One of the most common things I hear from my friends, my mom, you guys, my classmates, my co-workers, is how do you stay so organized? If you're new here and not a returning viewer, just for a little bit of context on me, I have a full-time in-office job. I do content, social media on TikTok primarily, Instagram, YouTube, and then I also go to grad school at night, all in person night classes. So, I have definitely mastered my organization skills. It's taken me some time, but I know you guys have asked me time and time again to go through my spreadsheets, my organizing, my calendar, my planners, my journals, literally everything. On top of that, I do have ADHD, so I really can tell you everything you need to know when it comes to organizing your life. I think my credentials also speak for themselves because I used to be super unorganized. I would be sitting in my lectures and they would say like, "Oh, did you guys hand in the assignment?" and I was like, "What assignment?" So, going from that to the way I've now become is just like a full 180, truly. If you guys knew me back then, this was not the vibe.
A big part of why I became this way was because A, I started juggling a lot of things, but B, when you find that routine that you don't really have in college where you're going to like a job, for example, every single day at the same time every single day, you learn the routines and like what you need to do to survive, how to budget, all that stuff. It becomes very nice to feel organized and in charge of your life, especially when it comes to like spending, organizing your time, even some of the methods that I do to organize myself at work. I'm going to get into all those. You guys have really loved my spreadsheets, so they're all down below in the templates I use. I'll explain all of them in depth today cuz I don't think I've ever done that before. But, I just want to preface like you do not have to force yourself to do all these things. Obviously, nobody's life is going to look exactly the same, but I will talk you guys through why I do each type of organization method and why it helps me. We can just chat here and you'll learn a little bit more about how I became this way, like super type A.
First thing I want to get into is Google Calendar because this can be applicable to all of you. If you have a Gmail account, it's the easiest thing to use. I prefer it over the iPhone calendar. I hate the iPhone calendar, it just like doesn't make sense to me. Google Calendar is just really, really easy. You can change the colors and like color code it. You can also have multiple emails linked into one calendar. You have to just subscribe to new calendars. So, what I do is I have my work calendar with my work email, and then I have my content calendar, my content email, and then my school email, so they're all like different emails. I like to color code them to different shades of like pink and purple. If you work a job, you should not be putting everything on your calendar that you share with your co-workers. You should have a shadow calendar always just to put your personal appointments and stuff, but that can also feel really overwhelming to have so many calendars to manage. You can have all the calendars just like on one interface if that makes sense. Like it's just so easy to see.
The number one thing I would advise using Google Calendar for is like any sort of like future events, brain dump, tasks, time blocking. You can do it for everything. So, for example, let's say I'm working from home tomorrow and I I'm going through my head and I'm like, "Okay, I have to get this done and this done and this done and this done." How am I going to time block that time to get some brand deals filmed, get a video done, reshoot something, eat my healthy meals, go on a walk, go to the gym, wash my hair, whatever it is that I have to do that's like personally for myself, I will start time blocking. So, I'll say like, "Okay, you're going to wake up at this time. I'm going to wash my hair or I'm going to go to the gym." When you start getting in this habit, you just are so much better at like pre-planning your steps cuz then you realize if I'm going to the gym, it takes me 10 minutes to walk there or 20 minutes to drive there. Like you have to kind of like really think through how many things you can realistically get done in the day, and that's why I love time blocking cuz it makes me realize, "You know what? I'm overdoing it."
Another thing that I love GCal for is if I'm like writing an email and something pops up where it's like, "I need to remember to send this email in 3 days and I have to attach this file." How many things get lost in our emails that we forget about? And obviously, if you work a job, it's not as optional to just be like, "Oops, I forgot." So, what I love to do is like if I see an email, I right away put it somewhere else. I have to remember, in 3 days I'm sending this email, I have to attach this file. Something that really helps me with my content stuff, if I do like a video for a brand, there's multiple steps in the process that I'm going to have like a due date, signing a contract, doing a concept brief, actually sending in my first draft, my second draft, analytics, closing out an invoice. There's so many due dates with one single brand video. So, what my management does, which I really like, my manager will send me calendar notifications that are like, "You have this video due today. You have this analytics due today." Having someone like that helps me work so much better, especially because I am doing this on the side of my full-time job. to be organized. I don't want to be bombarded with like text messages about sending in something if I'm not home. If you also do content or anything like that, if you do freelance work and you want to remember due dates, invoices, or if you're getting paid under the table, like there's just so many ways you could organize your calendar. What I do is like I put at the top of my calendar on that day, "Payment due." Especially if you're chasing invoices, people will allow you to forget. They're not going to remind you that they owe you money, so you should be on top of that. Having everything in my Google Suite and having everything like super organized and thought through and like your reminders, it definitely helps me stay on top of everything.
Another thing that we should all be optimizing is a clean inbox. I go back and forth with this one because I manage so many inboxes right now. I have like my personal inbox which I use for like taxes, utility bills get sent there, my online order anything I use that email. It's like my basic email I made when I was like 10. Then I have my work email, then I have my school email, then I have my content email, and then I have like managed email accounts that I also do for work and content. I have a bunch of those. So, there's a lot of emails to look through. You need to optimize the clean inbox method. It sucks cuz I get a lot of spam emails, but it just is so worth it. Clean brain, clean inbox. It's funny because my text messages are a different story. As organized as I am with this work stuff, I'm not as organized with my texting just because I feel like if anyone else gets this feeling, you're, you know, out and about doing something off your phone, off your computer, and you look at your phone and it's like email, email, email, email, email, Slack, Zoom, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do text message, text message, text message. So, I'm just like overwhelmed when I like leave my phone for too long, and then I feel like the emails and the Zoom chats and whatever like take precedent over my text messages. So, oftentimes I miss messages from my family and they're like, "Girl, you are so rude." And I'm like, "Oh my god, I did not see that." Like I did, but I forgot. I'm just one of those people again with the ADHD, like if I don't respond the second I see it, it's out of my brain. I don't remember you sending that.
Now, let's get into the spreadsheets, what you guys are probably all here for. I had a couple videos do really well talking about my organization methods and I think it's probably because I'm very type A and people are like, "What on earth are you doing?" I know it seems fake, but like this is the way I operate cuz like I just said, I really need the organization, especially with so many things in my brain all the time. So, I have a few spreadsheets. They're all available as templates like I said. I'm going to start with my content spreadsheet cuz I get some questions on this. I guess it's not the most relatable spreadsheet because not everyone is doing like freelance work, but it's really helpful for me. It's a huge spreadsheet that literally has like tabs under it where you can like change and there's more spreadsheets. Main one is short form planner. This is for TikTok, Reel, and YouTube Shorts. I have an idea, the video concept, and then I have the platform. So, not every video goes on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. Sometimes I syndicate them, sometimes I don't. Then I do the style of video, voiceover because I do a lot of voiceovers. Talking is just like if I'm sitting and talking, like let's say like a monthly favorites video is like I'm just sitting here and talking. A vlog is like I'm walking out and about, but I'm vlogging to the camera and I'm talking. ASMR is like I'm not talking, but I'm putting the sound on like that. And then music is like no sound, I'm just doing music. Pictures is like if I'm doing a photo swipe or something. And then we have status, not started, planning, which is like I've thought about it, but I haven't started filming anything. Gathering clips is like maybe it's a TikTok that involves a lot of clips and I'm looking through my camera roll, so I'm putting it together, but it's not like done yet. Filming clips is like I have to actively film these clips. It's like a new vlog or whatever. Text and voiceover is like everything is done on the video. I have to just like lock in and do the voiceover and finish up the text. Then I have the film date and the post date. This is not the most accurate thing. I just kind of have like ballparks again cuz if I remember my work from home schedule or my hair wash schedule, like that helps me remember when I'm going to film something. Brands to note is kind of like a column I don't really use, but if you are like filming a video, let's say, and you remember that you really want to talk about a certain product in that video, like a monthly favorites video, you can write that here. And there's also a column for brand events, which is just the event, the location, the date, the times, deliverables if you have any deliverables. Contacts is like if you are doing content, social media, or if you're doing like any sort of other media job and you want to remember your contacts. Whenever I email a brand or somebody emails me and I get to like be in touch with them, I write their name down and their contacts, so if I ever like lose touch with them, I can remember the last time I sent them an email, especially if I'm trying to remember like if they had any colleagues that I could connect with. Some people are out of office, sometimes your email accounts like get deleted, whatever it might be. Like I like to remember who I was talking to.
The brand tracker, this is more to track if you're pitching yourself to brands. And again, this can totally be tweaked if you have like a different type of job, but it could be somewhat similar to this. If you're in conversation about a brand deal, it's a paid deal, if it's an exchange deal, if it's gifting, if you're getting PR, if the brand was unresponsive. The brand deals, again, this is like anyone who does freelance or is invoicing anybody, this is very helpful. In the spreadsheet, we have the brand, the payment, the draft due date, which is either you gave a concept, the contract has been signed, product is in transit, the product has been received, you're editing the video, you sent the first draft, you posted it, and you were paid for the deal. And then the payment date, especially if you have a job that involves more clients or if you're providing a service like an agency or if you're doing billable hours, like you don't always get paid on like a bi-weekly schedule, so this is just what works for me, but I really want to encourage you guys to like take these spreadsheets and tweak them because once you make a copy of these, they're all editable, so you can change them up. It's just kind of to give you like an idea.
We have my budgeting spreadsheet. my most common questions, like how do you use this? It's literally humongous. There's one for each month of the year. Basically, I started this spreadsheet when I first got my job, so I would calculate each paycheck I got that month, how much I put into savings, the remainder for the month to spend. You can also build the spreadsheet out more and allocate where you're putting your savings for like 401k, for Roth IRA, whatever else you're putting, you know, high yield savings. Seeing these numbers and seeing what you actually earned that month and then how much you saved. And then there's some side hustles. If you do like Depop, if you do babysitting, waitressing, freelance work, social media posting, whatever it might be. You can add that in there. If I sold something on Depop and I made like 10 bucks, I'm not saving that money. I'm just going to get a coffee, but if you're someone who really likes to allocate your money, same paycheck every 2 weeks, this is so helpful. There's groceries, drinking and going to the bars, dining out, restaurants, any sort of like lunches you buy out at work, coffee shops, utilities, Wi-Fi, gas, electric, whatever else, water. I put supplies like cleaning and toiletries, things you don't find fun. They're necessary purchases, so I put them in a different category than shopping because I would definitely give myself $50 a month, let's say, to buy any sort of like cleaning supplies I might need. Those things do feel necessary, like toilet paper. It is what it is. When I need to buy them, I'll buy them. Shopping, transportation, if you take the subway or the metro, you know, you have a car you fill up with gas. Appointments, like your nails, your haircuts, your waxes, whatever else you get. Your subscriptions, Spotify, Netflix, HBO Max, Roku, Kindle. There's so many subscriptions you'll forget that you have. And then activities. This is like if I go to a museum, if I go to the movies, if I go to a play. This is so extra. You don't have to do it, but if you really are interested, I think you should all do it for like 1 month and see what you're actually spending. When I pay my credit card bill or when the month is over, I'll print out my statement and then just go through each line item and allocate that money. When you're doing a spreadsheet, you have to do a formula of like equals and then you can add amounts plus plus plus plus plus. And then when you press enter on your computer, it'll calculate how much you spent. If you're super type A, you could do this weekly and then you could be a little bit more on track with your money. But if you've never budgeted before, you should definitely do this at least for like 1 month. After the month is over, just go through your old statement and get it all input in here. And of course, there are times when shopping will be higher, like if you have an event, if you have a wedding, if it's Christmas, whatever. And then there's times where other things will be lower. Maybe you worked from home, your gas or your metro will be lower.
I get a lot of questions about like why I do it this way and I think it's just because it's helpful to have the data. I wouldn't say it's the most like practical budgeting tool. There's so many other ones. This is kind of what I do. I'm trying to do my write-offs. When you get paid from a brand deal or, you know, an invoice or whatever, you're just getting that entire amount of money. You have to owe that money back to the IRS and you have to calculate your taxes quarterly or yearly and then you just have to owe them like thousands and thousands of dollars, especially depending on how much you earned. Write-offs are you explaining that these purchases you made are related to your job and you made them on your personal card and that can subtract from your income. So, if I bought camera equipment, which I did this year, the camera that I'm filming with right now, I can write that off. This was a business expense. This helped the quality of my job, whatever. might be like that's a little bit less of the money that I earned because it went towards my job. The goal is to find a lot of write-offs in your statements to just show that as you were going month by month, you were spending on certain things to help your content, for example. It's hard for me because I've made so many purchases that have been included in so many videos. But again, not every purchase can be proved. If I bought clothing for a video that I made a whole video about, like there's just like certain intricacies. Some people say that nails count as write-offs. I don't know. For example, if you're like a food creator and you go to restaurants, if you're trying to turn those meals into content, including like videos, writing, whatever it might be where you're turning that meal into a form of like income, you can technically write off those meals. But again, I'm not good at this. I have to really go through my statements and like outline everything. Also, any subscriptions that I buy for editing. Yeah, there's a lot of things that go into content and if you don't keep track of your expenses, you'll owe more money.
And now the last spreadsheet is the assignment spreadsheet. It's a very quick though. It's just literally the class that I'm taking, the assignment, the due date, cuz sometimes they're due at like class time or sometimes they're due at like midnight. The length of the assignment, the grade weight, the status, which is like I started planning it, I completed it, I sent it in, and then the grade I got, any notes I have, like if the teacher said any notes about the assignment or like what should we do or what we should not do. If you're someone with like three to five classes, this is so helpful.
Okay, that's enough about the spreadsheets. I wanted to get into a little bit about my devices. This is my iPad Pro 13-in, I believe. People always ask me what this case is. It's a magic keyboard sold by Apple. It like detaches from the iPad. You just snap it on with the MagSafe. This is basically my computer. People like to do, you know, gaming on their iPad, thumbnails, art, all that stuff. Like I don't really do those things, so it's not very useful to me. But if I ever have to sign a contract, this little pencil is the Apple Pencil. What I really like about it is you can put your wrist on the iPad and fully like write something down and it won't like move the You know what I mean? Like when you're signing like a document on a computer and the cursor goes everywhere. This is so amazing. So, if you're someone who draws a lot digitally or you do thumbnails or art or digital media, this is so helpful. A laptop is more necessary than an iPad, but if you're between the two and you think an iPad would be more useful to you, I 100% recommend it. And I used to not believe I would ever need an iPad.
But then I also have my 2020 MacBook Pro 16-in. This was a gift for graduating high school and it still works really, really well. I think I actually have broken this a few times, too. There was one time where my mouse pad fully like sunk in and I had to get it fixed. I also have this little like screen saver that I made, this collage, and I don't really like it. It's from like 2 years ago, so I have to fix it. On my computer, I book flights. If I have like a really formal email, I will write it on my computer. And then my main thing about my computer is I have editing for YouTube. Need to have a big screen. I don't know if I'll ever buy a desktop computer for editing. Maybe one day, but I really like that this is transportable. Obviously, it doesn't have a ton of storage. I think it has like 1 TB, which is a lot, but my YouTube videos take up 200 GB per video usually with the editing software. So, I usually do like one video at a time. I also save a lot of files on here, like all my audio files, my project files, my clips for my videos. I also film on this camera. This is the Sony MV1, I believe. The files are filmed in like 4K, so when they go onto my computer, they are so large. And my computer's like breaking down if I have saved too many, so I definitely recommend an external hard drive as well. I just haven't used one myself yet, but if you're someone who has like low storage on your computer and you want to edit more, you need a hard drive probably. But I love this. This case is from Burga, also. I think eventually I will get a new computer, probably in the next few years. I would guess this computer has like one or two more years left on her. I still have the touch bar, which I'm pretty sure they took away. And then for my thumbnails, I make them on Canva. They're just like super simple. I have a whole Canva doc where I just have every thumbnail I've ever made sitting there, so I can remember like how I made them and like the font formula. So, that's my computer. And then for class and work, I just use my iPad usually because I don't really need to do that much like intricate computer stuff. And my computer is heavy.
To end off the video, let's talk about all of my planners. As many digital things that we can do, there's nothing compared to like writing a to-do list down. This is like actually crazy. You don't need this many planners. This is not all the planners I actively use. My favorite brand ever for planners, I will never ever buy another planner, is Papier. Depending on if you buy it during a sale, these are like $35 to $40 each. Clearly can't recommend them enough. I also love keeping them as like little souvenirs of my life. So, this was my freshman year one. Claudia Sulewski put me on to this. They all have different styles. I think these are all still available. These are like forever patterns, which is great cuz this is from 2020. I used to color code each class and the readings and stuff. Like I was so organized. I used to love putting like every single little thing on my planners, especially assignments, exams. I used to have a lot of part-time jobs in college, too, so I would put like the days I was in the office and stuff. All that was on here. I also moved on to this blue one. I don't know what year this was. Oh, this is my planner for my full-time job, like the first year of working. I just got a planner even though I really didn't fill it out that much. Like you can literally see there's nothing. I think I just like Google Calendar more as I started working. This is pretty empty. And I also wasn't doing content at this time, 24 to 25. I love this planner though, probably one of my favorite ones. Actual one that I'm using right now is this one, the pink one. It says Chiara Lucia. It's my first year of doing content really fully, so it was really cute to get it like engraved. And I think all the planners have free engraving, so you can just get your name monogrammed. So worth it. It makes it feel so personal. And then this one is a little bit different. You can see the layout. I don't love it as much as the other ones, but this is a new one for me. When I thought TikTok was going to be deleted in January of 2025, I bought this recipe journal. This is the cutest thing ever. I'm obsessed with it. I don't use it that much because I intend to have this forever and I want to like build it out with all my favorite recipes. I only write down recipes that I go back to a lot and that require a lot of steps that are like annoying to remember. Having it written down is so helpful when I'm cooking. I can just like open it and read it. Also, for family recipes, this is so great. I think for Christmas one year, I gave my mom one of these recipe planners and I wrote down all these family recipes and I had like recipe cards. It was such a cute gift. If you also have a lot of dietary restrictions, this could be super helpful to remember like all your recipes that you really like. And they're organized by breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then they have like a table of contents where you can put what page each recipe is on. I cannot recommend this enough.
My two Moleskines, these are both gifted by Moleskine, which is so awesome. This one is my like journal Moleskine. I would say this is for more of like my deep thoughts, not really for planning cuz it's also very small. I have to get better at this, but I love to do photos or whatever of my time that day. I have a bad memory about things, as you can tell. I have to be very organized, so I like to have little mementos about whatever happened that day. I always remember little tchotchkes and I forget to like actually journal about them and like put them in here, so I definitely recommend doing that though. It's really cute. I'm not someone who loves the whole like bullet journaling. This is very simple. love how small it is cuz if I go on like a trip and I want to have a notebook on me, I just bring this and then I can write down to-do lists or like ideal lists. My newest favorite one is my red Moleskine. I was like unsure if I would need a notebook this big and I love it. It's great for my mega to-do lists. I always write down all my content stuff in here. I just treat this like my content notebook, basically, cuz I have so many digital organization methods, but like nothing beats a pen and paper and a to-do list. I really, really recommend this if you're someone who wants to have like a more physical open notebook all the time. This like lives on my little desk spot. And yeah, that's everything regarding my organization. I hope that was helpful. I know you guys have been wanting this video for a while and I hope all the overlays on the screen were like helpful to see what I was talking about. At the end of the day, you don't need to be perfect with all this. This took me a long time to reach this level, but I will say as someone with ADHD, with so many things to manage in my brain, this is the most helpful way I organize everything and I hope this helped you guys a little bit get some ideas on how you can organize your own life. Even just small things like buying a planner. You don't have to fill it out every single day. Let me know if you guys want to see more about my organization methods and how I plan things, maybe more of like a vlog style. And yeah, I'll see you guys in my next video very, very soon. Bye.