How do you accomplish everything on your calendar each day? Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to join the Greater Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce Smart Talk for Women Luncheon in which the featured round-table topic was “How Can We Get it All Done? Prioritizing and Managing Your Integrity” – no doubt an engaging and lively discussion with over 20 other female business owners and managers. Truly motivational, I’m looking forward to see what next month’s topic will be! Afterward, I focused on how I best manage both my professional and personal time – the magic combination is an integration of Todoist and Google Calendar.
The Urge To Purge Your Home
We’re all guilty of clutter on one level or another, but we don’t have to succumb to it! In our home, I’m getting ready for my quarterly(ish) purge to completely declutter. I promise you the purge process is easy to follow – every single room, desk, closet, cabinet, drawer and shelf is emptied and sorted into three simple categories: Keep It, Donate It or Trash It.
There’s Something About Quickbooks
Fun fact: I majored in accounting during my first two years of college back the day (as the kids say.) Like many students in the quasi-adult world of college, I realized that my heart was elsewhere – so, I switched majors just before my third year and jumped into the then unknown world of advertising and marketing. It was the best decision I could have made for myself, as I fell in love with the marketing industry.
Celebrating Our Second Wedding Anniversary with Paper Anniversary
When Anna V. of Paper Anniversary® reached out to Thomas and I to learn about the story of our relationship, we were surprised and excited! For each of our wedding anniversaries, I’ve supported Anna V.’s small business and purchased beautiful, creative anniversary gifts for Thomas – I’m a big fan of hers, so it feels wonderful to be able to support each other as female entrepreneurs.
A Ribbon-Cutting for Simplified
Last week, Simplified celebrated a major milestone – our ribbon-cutting! The Greater Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce kindly hosted it in their beautiful boardroom.
I am so extraordinarily grateful to my family, friends, colleagues and fellow chamber members for supporting Simplified at the ribbon-cutting and in spirit!
Managing and Maximizing Your Time
Tracking time is a challenge for many small businesses. My New Year’s resolution this year is to track Simplified time as diligently as I do for our clients’ projects. If you’re a small business owner, you know far too well how an hour can swiftly jump to five hours while working on a passion project for your own business. You get really excited and pull an all-nighter, then take a nap and get right back to the grind for your clients without skipping a beat. Does this sound familiar? Tracking time can change this for you!
Celebrating the Holidays with Kindness
Happy Holidays! Today, I offer the simplest of Simplified Suggestions during this holiday season – please be kind to yourself and others. With all of the chaos in the world, kindness is the best we can offer to anyone and what we can control within ourselves. Show love to those who you care about and give yourself love, too.
Creating Order Out of the Holiday Gift Chaos
People often joke about my incessant use of spreadsheets for everything in my life – I totally get it, it’s a tad out of control. True story – my husband won me over with spreadsheets when we first started dating. He created two shared spreadsheets for the movies he needed to catch me up on (don’t judge me because I haven’t seen any of the Indiana Jones movies) and restaurants that we should try together. I think I knew I was in love when Thomas created a shared Google Calendar as I melted into a love puddle, obviously.
Jokes aside, I can confidently say that my fondness for spreadsheets absolutely prepares us for holiday gift giving (and budget-tracking) success. Fun Fact: I love giving gifts, surprisingly though, that is not my love language (it’s Words of Affirmation). What I love more than giving gifts is organization; hence, for the last several years, I’ve been keeping track of each year’s holiday gift recipients, gift types, mailing addresses, budgets, postage, etc.
Mindfulness and Making Time for Yourself
Does time for yourself sound like a foreign concept to you, too? While I was away on a short vacation last week, I grappled internally with the irritating idea of not having the time to create my weekly Simplified Suggestion post. This type of scheduling stress tends to happen around this time of year for most people, the holidays overtake your personal and professional schedules, and it can become ridiculously chaotic if you let it.
What I decided to do is going to be a shock to everyone who knows me personally – I skipped last week’s post. Completely skipped it, without notice and without warning. After too much deliberation, I decided that being mindful of my head-space and making time for myself to relax, especially around this time of year, was most important for my mental health and well-being. And do you know what? It worked like a charm! I flew back home with a more clear head-space and ready to take on the work ahead of me for myself and my clients.
A Simplified Holiday Interpretation
Since our first holiday season together in 2014, Thomas and I have kept our seasonal decorations simple. A beautiful rosemary tabletop tree here, some seasonally-scented candles there – it’s just that clutter isn’t our thing. So, when it came to a tree for our home, we turned to Not Martha, a super unique DIY blog with tons of amazing ideas for your home. Not Martha presents an amazing DIY idea for an alternative to a standard Christmas tree. Not Martha’s Christmas Tree Ornament Mobile is such a fun interpretation, that once Thomas and I saw it we knew we had to make it happen for our home.
Jess Maxson, Principal
