The Organized Coach - Productivity, Business Systems, Time Management, ADHD, Routines, Life Coach, Entrepreneur

Register for my biggest event of the year! 5 Days. 5 Deals.
https://simplysquaredaway.com/bfwaitlist

"I know what to do. Why can’t I make myself do it?”

Have you ever said that while looking at a cluttered counter, an overflowing closet, or a room you keep avoiding?

In this episode of The Organized Coach Podcast, we’re getting curious about what happens between wanting to organize and actually starting. I’ll walk you through how to turn a project you’ve been putting off into a small, specific appointment you can follow through on.

You’ll learn how to give yourself a clear starting point, connect your task to something you want, and notice the evidence that you’re becoming someone who can create order.

In this episode, we’ll explore:

• What to ask yourself when you think, “I just can’t make myself do it.”

• The difference between an organizing intention and a calendar appointment.

• Why “organize the basement” can leave you feeling stuck.

• How to choose a small task with a clear finish line.

• What to do when your appointment arrives and you still don’t feel motivated.

• How completed tasks help you practice believing, “I’m learning how to create order.”

Try this this week

Choose one organizing project you’ve been avoiding. Define one small task, put it on your calendar, and write down why it matters to you. Afterward, pause and give yourself credit for what you completed.

5 Days of Organizing Deals | November 23–27, 2026

Want support with the thoughts, emotions, and decisions that keep you stuck? One of my upcoming offers is The Decluttering Mindset Bundle, featuring ten hand-picked classes from industry experts with specific actions to help you understand and shift your mindset so you can create order anytime you want. 

The full preview arrives November 18. If you’re already on my email list, you’ll receive the details. If you’re not, sign up for organizing deal notifications here.

Happy Organizing!
Tracy

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/193

Have you ever walked into someone's home and thought, "I LOVE how this feels!" but had no idea how to create that same feeling in your own space?

You might know how to declutter and organize your home, but decorating it? That's a whole different skill!

In this episode of The Organized Coach Podcast, I'm joined by Dani Watson, host of the Fig & Farm at Home podcast, to talk about what comes after organizing: creating a beautiful, cohesive home that reflects your personality, tells your story, and supports the life you want to live.

The timing of this conversation couldn't have been better! I'm in the middle of transforming our former living room into a dining room where we can comfortably gather 12 people around the table. I've sold furniture we've had for 31 years, purchased a new dining table, and started making decorating decisions that are completely outside my comfort zone.

Dani helps me work through those decisions in real time, and I discover just how much decorating and organizing have in common.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why organizing and decluttering are the foundation of a beautifully decorated home.

• How to discover your personal decorating aesthetic, even if you think you don't have a style.

• Simple ways to create a cohesive look throughout your home without everything matching.

• How to use your vision, personal aesthetic, and desired feeling to make confident decorating decisions.

• Why meaningful decor doesn't have to be inherited or expensive to tell your story.

• What slow curating means and why you don't need to decorate an entire room in one weekend.

• How to decide whether something truly belongs in your home.

One of my favorite takeaways is that creating a beautiful home isn't about copying a Pinterest picture or filling every empty space. It's about understanding what you love, being intentional about what you bring into your home, and creating spaces that feel like YOU.

Whether you're starting fresh in a room, updating a space you've lived in for decades, or simply wanting to love your home a little more, this conversation will inspire you to look at your surroundings differently.

Connect with Dani Watson

Dani helps women confidently decorate their homes by teaching practical design principles and helping them discover their unique personal aesthetic.

Podcast: Fig & Farm at Home

Website: figandfarmathome.com

Get the 15-Minute Declutter Challenge: https://simplysquaredaway.com/declutter

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/192

What if you could feel just as confident about getting organized as you do about arriving at a destination on a road trip?

After traveling to Wyoming for my nephew's wedding, I started thinking about how differently we approach organizing our homes. When we plan a trip, we choose a destination, decide when we're leaving, and make a plan to get there. We expect to arrive, even if we hit traffic, take a wrong turn, or need to stop along the way.

But when it comes to organizing, we often question whether we'll ever get there.

In this episode of The Organized Coach Podcast, I'm sharing how to approach organizing as a project instead of a never-ending chore. We'll talk about creating a clear destination, breaking your project into manageable steps, and using 15-minute organizing sessions to make meaningful progress.

You'll also discover why obstacles don't mean you're failing, how organizing is a skill you can learn, and what changes when you start believing that getting organized is inevitable.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why organizing works better when you have a destination and a plan.

• How to approach organizing your home as a project with a beginning and an end.

• Why 15-minute organizing sessions are more effective when they're part of a bigger plan.

• What road trips can teach us about setbacks, distractions, and unexpected obstacles.

• Why organizing is a learnable skill, just like driving.

• How to stop questioning your progress and start trusting the process.

• What it means to believe that getting organized is inevitable.

Your next step:

Choose one area of your home that you want to organize. Decide what you want the finished result to look like, break the project into smaller steps, and schedule your first 15-minute session.

You don't have to finish everything today. You just need to know where you're going and keep moving toward it.

Remember: Not being there yet doesn't mean you're not getting there.

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/191

You know you need help in your business, but hiring someone can feel like a big—and expensive—next step. What if an intern could be the perfect solution?

In this episode, I’m talking with Brittany Braswell about how entrepreneurs can use interns to delegate repeatable tasks, free up their time, and even get their businesses more organized in the process.

Brittany shares how to decide what an intern could take off your plate, where to find interns, paid versus unpaid internships, creative ways to compensate them, and how to make training simpler than you might think. We also get into the practical questions that can make delegation feel overwhelming: passwords, logins, access, SOPs, and whether you need to have everything perfectly organized before you begin.

If you’ve been thinking, “I need help, but I’m not ready to hire,” this episode may give you an entirely new option.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to identify tasks you could delegate to an intern
• What interns can actually do in an online business
• Paid vs. unpaid internships and ways to compensate interns
• How to train an intern without creating a mountain of SOPs first
• Ways to handle passwords, logins, and access
• Where Brittany recommends looking for interns
• How bringing in help can actually force you to create better systems and processes
• Why an internship can be a great first step toward building a team

Connect with Brittany:

Delegation Decoder: brittanybraswellrd.com/delegate

The Intern Accelerator: brittanybraswell.com/tia

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/190

Does your brain ever feel like it’s holding 100 things at once? Things you need to do, remember, buy, schedule, decide, or tell someone about? None of them may be a big deal on their own, but together, they can make life feel chaotic.

In this episode, I’m sharing three simple systems that can instantly reduce some of that chaos without a fancy planner, complicated app, or elaborate productivity system.

The first is a capture system. Instead of expecting your brain to remember every idea, task, appointment, and random thought that pops up, you need one trusted place to put it. I’m sharing the simple system I just started using with Siri and an Apple Reminders list called “Capture,” plus how I’m exploring using AI to help process everything I capture.

The second system starts with a completely different way of looking at overwhelm: overwhelm is an organizing signal. Instead of letting “I don’t know where to start” stop you, you can use the same organizing skills you’d use on a cluttered closet to organize a project, your calendar, a decision, or everything swirling around in your head.

Finally, we’ll talk about reset systems. Your home doesn’t stay organized because you organize it once. Life happens. Things come out, mail comes in, dishes get used, and clutter starts accumulating again. A simple reset gives you a way to return a high-chaos area to baseline before the mess compounds.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why your brain shouldn’t be your storage system

• How to create one simple place to capture tasks, ideas, and things you need to remember

• The Siri capture system I’m testing in my own life

• How AI can help you process mental clutter instead of adding more complexity

• Why overwhelm can become your cue to organize instead of your cue to shut down

• How to “declutter” a project, decision, calendar, or overwhelming situation

• How to identify the places where chaos repeatedly builds in your life

• Why a reset doesn’t mean cleaning your entire house

• How to create a tiny reset you’ll actually use

The three systems are simple: Capture. Clear. Reset.

Being organized doesn’t mean eliminating chaos from your life. It means knowing how to create order when and where you need it.

Start with one system. Make it easy enough that you’ll actually use it. Then notice how much lighter life feels when your brain no longer has to hold everything at once.

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/189

What do you really want? And what if you’re not even sure how to answer that question?

In this episode, I’m talking with money manifestation coach Jamie Berman about what manifestation actually means and how it can help us create more of what we want from abundance in our businesses and lives to becoming a more organized version of ourselves.

Jamie shares how she went from being terrified of being seen and speaking in front of people to building a successful coaching business, and why learning to trust herself played such a big role in that transformation. We also talk about her decision to walk away from a successful niche when it no longer felt like the work she wanted to do.

We get into manifestation from a faith perspective, including Jamie’s belief that it can be about partnering with God rather than trying to control everything ourselves. She explains why getting clear on what you want matters, how visualization and vision boards can help, and why taking action and surrendering the outcome can exist together.

We also talk about what happens when you’re genuinely content with your life and don’t know what you want next. Jamie shares some really good questions for uncovering desires that have nothing to do with getting a bigger house, a nicer car, or more stuff.

And, of course, I ask her how all of this applies to getting organized. If you’ve spent years believing, “I’m just not an organized person,” what would happen if you started seeing yourself as someone who could become organized and began practicing being her?

In this episode, we talk about:

• What manifestation actually means and how Jamie approaches it through faith
• Getting clear on what you really want
• Being content with your life while still allowing yourself to desire more
• Using vision boards, visualization, journaling, and other practices
• How your beliefs and identity influence what you create
• Becoming the person you want to be before you fully believe you’re her
• Taking action without needing to know exactly how everything will happen
• Trusting yourself when you feel called to make a change
• Surrendering the outcome instead of trying to control it

If you’ve been thinking about what you want in this next season or wondering whether you’re even allowed to want something more when your life is already good, I think you’ll love this conversation.

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/188

You’ve decluttered. You’ve created systems. You actually know how to organize. So why can one pile of papers on the counter make you feel like you’re a complete mess?

There’s a big difference between being disorganized and feeling disorganized. And what’s happening around you doesn’t have to become evidence of who you are.

In this episode, I share a recent coaching example of a client who came to our call feeling like a “hot mess,” even though she’s actually very organized. What she really had were open loops. Once we identified what needed to happen and when she was going to do it, nothing had actually been completed—but she felt completely different.

That’s because feeling organized isn’t about the absence of disorder. It’s about your relationship to the disorder that’s currently there.

We’ll talk about why “I’m a mess” feels so different from “These papers need decisions,” how our old 10-second scripts become well-worn paths in our brains, and why getting rid of more stuff may never make you feel organized if your definition of organized is “nothing left to organize.”

You’ll also hear two simple analogies—being a good cook and rerouting while driving—that will help you rethink what it actually means to be organized.

An organized person is someone who knows how to create order when and where she needs it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why feeling disorganized is different from being disorganized
• How open loops contribute to overwhelm
• Why a pile of papers doesn’t determine whether you’re organized
• How to replace judgment with thoughts that point you toward action
• Why your definition of “organized” may be impossible to achieve
• Why getting rid of more stuff won’t necessarily make you feel organized
• How to start collecting evidence that you already know how to create order
• Why getting back on track is evidence that you’re organized—not evidence that you failed

Instead of asking, “What still needs to be organized?” start noticing where you already demonstrate the skill of creating order.

You may already possess the skill you’ve been waiting for your house to prove you have.

All links mentioned in the post can be found here: https://simplysquaredaway.com/187

Decluttering is NOT about the stuff.

In this episode, I’m talking with professional organizer and Declutter Hub cofounder Lesley Spellman about what’s really happening underneath our clutter. We explore the emotions that can make letting go difficult, including guilt, aspiration, and the stories we attach to our belongings.

Lesley shares three key ingredients for decluttering success: kindness toward yourself, having a meaningful goal for your home, and being realistic about your space, energy, and season of life. We also talk about why starting somewhere easier can help you build your “decluttering muscle” before tackling the sentimental stuff.

Plus, we take a peek behind the scenes of The Declutter Hub to hear how Lesley and Ingrid organize their own business using Asana, SOPs, and simple systems that have evolved over time.

If you’ve ever wondered why you know you want to declutter but still have such a hard time letting things go, this conversation will help you understand what may really be keeping you stuck.