This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Digital Decluttering: How to Make Tech Your Assistant, Not Your Adversary with Amanda Jefferson | 312

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Tired of feeling like your tech is running you instead of the other way around? You’re not alone—and you’re not stuck. It’s time to declutter your digital life and turn your tech into the reliable assistant you wish you had. Today’s guest is Amanda Jefferson, TEDx speaker, tech and productivity coach, and one of the world’s first certified KonMari consultants. Amanda has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Harper’s Bazaar, and more—and she’s on a mission to help you stop drowning in apps, files, and inboxes and start using tech to free up time, mental space, and actual energy. This episode is your permission slip to simplify. To stop over-engineering your systems. And to build a tech setup that supports your life and your business—without requiring an IT degree or another Sunday lost to Google Drive hell. In This Episode, We Cover: ✅ What digital clutter is actually costing you (spoiler: it’s a lot) ✅ How to train your tech to work like a full-time assistant ✅ Simple systems to manage email, files, and notifications ✅ Why perfection isn’t the goal—ease and clarity are ✅ The biggest digital organization myths (and what to do instead) ✅ How to make tech feel less overwhelming and more empowering You have big ideas, bold goals, and important work to do. Let’s make sure your tech supports that—not sabotages it. Connect with Amanda:  Website: https://www.indigoorganizing.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/hey.amandaj/ Free Gmail Declutter Checklist - https://www.indigoorganizing.com/gmail-checklist Related Podcast Episodes: Your Guide to a More Organized & Intentional Life with Shira Gill | 304 How To Declutter Your Life with Lisa Woodruff | 285 The 15-Minute Method To Getting It Done with Sam Bennett | 233 If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Share the Love: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. I'm Nicole Khalil and if you've been listening to This Is Woman's Work for a while, you know that cheese and coffee are my love languages and one size fits all solutions and technology are not. When it comes to tech in my business, I seem to have a magical talent for blowing things up with just a few clicks.

I think I'm making a simple, small tweak and yet somehow the shit hits the fan and my team is emailing me in all caps, not slacking mind you because again, tech is not my friend and email is about all I can handle. Or somehow my podcast RSV disappears or Square has invoiced a client in pesos. I don't know how I do it so I've just landed on the belief that technology hates me. And it's not just about how to use tech that is the problem, though again my team would very much like me to stop touching things. It's about which tech to use.

There are apps for everything, apps to schedule, apps to sell, apps to track, to communicate, to automate, to remind, to make coffee, probably, I don't know, about that app, but if it exists, please let me know. Anyway, figuring out what tech will actually work for me and my business, friend, at times, that has felt like my full-time job, which is tragic because I absolutely suck at it.

I often wish there was some magical tech guru who is up to speed on all the apps, all the platforms and all the payment processing systems, all the equipment, all the things that could just show up and tell me what I should be using, set it all up for me. Teach my team whatever it is they need to know. And slap little don't touch that stickies on every button that I should not be messing with. I would pay $1 million for that. Okay, maybe not that much, but a lot. But of course, when you're just getting started,

you're lucky if you even have $100 to invest. So we end up cobbling it together with Google searches, duct tape, and late night rage scrolling through comparison blogs. And before you know it, your digital world looks like a cluttered mess of apps, tools, and platforms you don't even remember downloading or paying for. But what if, and I mean, what if, our tech could actually work for us? Like a free assistant that never takes a sick day, doesn't require one-on-ones,

and doesn't send messages in all caps. What if there's a way to leverage technology without ending up as the digital equivalent of a hoarder? That's where today's guest comes in. Amanda Jefferson is a tech and productivity coach, TEDx speaker, one of the world's first Conmarie consultants and host of the top rated good enough ish podcast. She has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Harper's Bazaar and more, and

was recently named a top 50 women's speaker of 2024. Amanda helps busy women train their tech to work for them, not against them, reducing the mental load and adding hours back in their days. And I could not be more excited. So Amanda, welcome and please help. Can we start with where to start? If you're aware that you need a tool for your business or your life, any tips on how to

best find it without, again, accumulating to the clutter of all the apps that we're using. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Thanks so much for having me. That was an amazing introduction. I was having a hard time not cracking up in the middle of it. When I think about our digital clutter, I usually think in the big four.

The big four is emails, files, passwords, and photos. And then there's sort of the fifth, which is just how to use our tech. You know, like just, we get handed these thousand dollar machines and these beautiful white boxes with no user manual, no instructions. And it's just like, good luck. It's intuitive, you'll figure it out, right?

So usually what I say to people is start where you're having the most pain. So think about it, Is it emails? Is it passwords? Is it files? Is it photos? Is just figuring out and then start there, right? So I have, you know, obviously a million tips and tools that I can share for each of those different sections, but that's usually what I recommend is just figure out where you're going to start. So I'm curious for you, like which of those top four or that fifth one, which one rings the most stressful for you?

I mean, let's be real, they all are stressful. But I would say probably emails and passwords top the list. Emails from a quantity standpoint and knowing what to do with them. I kind of treat my emails like a weird todo list, so I have a very long inbox. And then passwords, it's just a function of remembering what, when, and when they change and where you have the codes. Like it's just all of that. Yeah. Yeah.

So I, you know, where I like, I have several clients that I work with. Most of the clients that I work with are small women, are women small business owners, and one of them, she says she has login issues. I got to see her process of every time she would try to log into the five sites that she accesses every day. Oh, that's not the password. Let me text my assistant. Okay, my assistant just got the code. This was what she was repeating all day long. That was creating an enormous amount of friction. I think for a lot of us, you have to invest a lot in the front end to find a tool that works for you and then stay consistent with it. So for example, for passwords, I recommend one password. Do you use a password manager at all or are they just kind of notes and that sort of thing?

Yeah, we started using LastPass. Prior to that, it was exactly what you're talking about and reaching out to 17 people trying to figure out who has what. We just had an issue a couple weeks ago where QR code was going to the wrong place and we realized somebody I had used three years ago who's no longer on the team had the... I mean, it was a mess. That's the kind of shit I create. Right, right. And especially when you're working with a team and everybody's trying to use the same

password. So something like One Pass or LastPass is great with my assistant. We have a whole vault that's shared between the two of us. So whenever I change a password, I'm very religious about making sure that I change it in there or she does the same. And it's very rare that I have password issues. So I think it may be that, you know, in the last pass, it's doing like a cleanup in there, just making sure that everything is right and all of that. So definitely recommend a password manager. But you have to kind of go through the suck to get to the...

Because there is a learning curve, right, of figuring it out. And like Chrome wants to save your passwords and Apple wants to save your passwords and they're all fighting and it's very confusing. But if you can get to the other side of that, it can definitely be a huge time saver. Well, and let's be honest, it sucks anyway, right?

Like not having a system sucks. The pain of figuring out a system can suck, but at some point in time, at least on the other side of that, it stops sucking. So what about emails? I'm not even gonna talk about my inbox. What about emails? So I'm a Gmail super, I'm an Apple super user and a Gmail super user. And I love Gmail because it

has this thing that you can do in your inbox that nobody knows about and it totally changes the game. So basically now when you go into your email, it's just kind of like a big blob. There's no distinction between what's important or what's not. And so you can actually change the inbox setting to something called priority inbox. And then it will magically create three and actually four sections where the top will be important and unread. And there is a function within Gmail

where you can train it to know what's important and what's not. The second section will be starred. And I think of starred as like a bulletin board in your office. Like, oh these are my theater tickets for this weekend. This is my flight confirmation. It's just like I don't need to do anything with this, but I just want to be able to find it really easily. And then the next sort of default category that it creates is everything else, which is just like here's the big blob that we don't necessarily think that you need to worry about, right? And then I have people create a third section in there, which is your action needed category.

So that's in your case, that's your little to do list, right? So as you're going through your email, you're adding things to the action needed so that every day we have this process. I think about it kind of like cleaning before you cook, instead of just getting into your email and being like, okay, email number one, what are we gonna do with this? Email number two. You kind of go in, you do this sort of pre-cooking process

where you clean, get everything in the right section, this goes in the start, this goes in action needed, this gets deleted, this gets archived. And then you're just looking at your 10 action needed emails and then addressing those. So that's like my number one tip for email, especially if you have Gmail, is looking at priority inbox. Okay. Well, I'm definitely checking out priority inbox.

A follow-up question there is while you're doing your pre-cooking routine, right, is that the time to forward anything that needs to be delegated? What do we do with the things that land in our inbox that are not meant for us to respond to that are better handled by somebody on your team? Yeah. So you could create a whole nother... It kind of depends on how your brain works. You could either forward as you go and just... It's kind of like that trick where they say if it takes less than five minutes, just do it in the minute. So you could either forward as you go and just, you know, it's kind of like that trick where they say if it takes less than five minutes, just do it in the minute. So you could just forward as you go.

Or you could create a little label or a folder that's forward so that as you're processing, you can just drag and drop everything into there. And then when you get to the end, it's like, okay, here's the 10 emails that I need to forward. You just have to be careful with those labels and folders because they can become black holes where it's like, oh, right, I said I was going to forward these things last week and they're still in there. But exactly, that's a great point.

Just take that opportunity to just forward it right then. What about the other two? Obviously, emails and passwords are my shtick. Any tips for files and photos? Yes. So for files, I definitely recommend finding, first of all, that everything's in the cloud so that I can throw your laptop in the river and you'll be sad for five minutes, but then you feel confident that everything that you've had is saved in the cloud.

So not on the desktop, not in the documents folder. And so for a lot of people, it's first understanding like, well, kind of like, what is the cloud and where are my documents? So your documents might be on iCloud or they might be on OneDrive or they might be in Dropbox or they might be in Google Drive or they might not be in any of those things and you actually don't know.

So first figuring out based on your system where things should live. I really like a more like agnostic tool like Dropbox where it doesn't matter if you have Windows or Apple or it just plays nice with everybody on the playground. And just having really, really simple folders and naming conventions for the files so that you can easily find them. And then a lot of people don't know how to use that sort of quick access or favorites thing on the sidebar where you can drag and drop things that you use all the time. People

are like going through layers and layers and layers of folders and files and trying to find things instead of pulling things out onto those files, into the favorites. Okay. And photos? Our bazillion photos. Yeah. So my favorite, and I haven't, I'm not an Android user, so I'm less well versed in that, but my favorite app for the iPhone is something called the Cleaner Kit app. And it's so great because you basically, you just install it and then it will go into your photo library. It's kind of like it lets you go wide before you go deep. So if you have 20,000 photos, you're not going to go like one by one by one by one, right?

But it'll go in there and it'll say, okay, here's all the blurry photos. Can I delete those? Here's all the screenshots. Can I delete those? Here's all the duplicates. It'll even tell you similar photos. So like if you took a picture of your kid in front of a tree and there's 15 of them, it'll be like, hey, we think this one is the best.

The other thing that it will do, which is really nice, is that you can kind of go by month. So instead of staring at 15,000 photos, it'll be like, okay, January has 300 photos. And it's like, oh, I can handle that. And it has kind of like a Tinder thing to it where you can swipe left or right and say like, keep, no, keep, no, keep, no. And so that's just like, I'm very much a fan of making anything bite size where it's like, I'm not going to deal with 18,000 photos, but I can deal with 300 photos in January.

And then so then when you go through and kind of get clear out all that junk, then you're left with so many less photos that you can actually look and see, like, oh, okay, which of these photos do I want to keep? The other thing I say about photos too is what is your end game? Do you want printable albums? Do you just want to be able to find a photo easily? What it is that you're trying to achieve dictates what you do to get there, if that makes sense. I want to take this one step further and ask about some favorite tech tools for working women. The vast majority of our listeners are working women. Outside of the four, which are big ones that you just mentioned, are there any apps or tools that you're just raving fan of or that

every working woman should know about? Yes. I think bookmarks. That is a number one. I think a lot of people really don't even know that exists. They don't even know that there is a bookmarks bar that is there. So they have 65 tabs open and they're not closing them because it's sort of like their little mental to do list. So definitely being a power user of the Chrome bookmark and just having a one-stop shop for all of the things that you use daily and projects that you're working on. So like if you're planning a trip to Italy, you can have a Italy folder and have all of the websites related to that in there.

I host a live workshop every single month. And so I have a folder for each one of those live workshops so that I have the checkout page and the sales page and everything that I need so that I'm not constantly looking for that. So that's a huge one that I don't think people use as much as they should. The other tool that I really encourage people to use is just like Siri, using Siri as your assistant. I have several lists in my reminders on my

iPhone that is Instagram ideas, email ideas, my shopping list. So I can be driving along and say, you know, I don't want to say it right now, but hey, Siri, you know, add bananas to the shopping list and it's going to do it. And not only is it going to do it, it's going to auto categorize it under the produce section. And it's a reminders list that's shared with my husband so that the next time he goes, I had to say, yeah, she just added bananas to my shopping list. Thank you. I do it all day long for remind me at five o'clock to so and so, right? Or add this to the Instagram ideas list.

It's like this free assistant that you're just dictating stuff to. Right? I think it's something you can use easily on your Apple Watch. So like just having Siri be this assistant that you're bossing around all day, I don't think people use it enough. Okay, so same question, but maybe more for entrepreneurs or, you know, women in business.

Are there any tools or tips or tricks that have been really helpful that you haven't already mentioned? I would say definitely a must-have for someone in business is having a calendar scheduler. I have a lot of clients that are still doing the old-fashioned back and forth, like, what about Tuesday at 1? What about Wednesday at 3?

So using something like Calendly or Acuity, I think think is definitely a must have for business owners. I also really like to take my email a step further and I use a tool called Superhuman, which I do pay $40 a month for, but it's email on steroids and it definitely makes my life a lot easier. So I really love that tool as well. And one of the tools that we love in my business is Streak CRM. Have you ever heard of Streak CRM? I have not, no. So it's basically an add-on to Gmail and it's a CRM inside of your Gmail so that you can

track all of your different sort of pitches. So within that, we have several different pipelines. We have this is where we track my speaking pitches, my podcast pitches, press pitches, one-on-one leads. And it's really, I've tried a lot of different CRMs and this one is very visual, how you can move people through the pipeline. And so my assistant and I do that together.

And that has been really a game changer. Well, I'll tell you too, on the receiving end of a lot of pitches, there is nothing more annoying than if somebody has no concept of who they pitched at. Like the amount of times where like, we already responded to your pitch and it's, it wastes my team and I's time and it's, it's super frustrating. It's like, get your shit together, lady, like put something in place. So that would be super helpful. I think on both sides, it'll help your credibility and perception for the person you're pitching to. And for those of us that are doing a lot of pitching or a lot of outreach, being able to categorize it in a simple and easy way

would be super helpful. So again, something I'm going to look into. Yeah, no, it's fantastic. And I think I have ADHD. I was diagnosed about a year ago. And like I said, I've tried lots of different CRMs. But for me, having things be really visual is really key. And so I pitched your podcast.

And so it's like We moved through the whole process of pitched, follow up one, follow up two, interested, scheduled, booked, post, and it just tells you exactly what to do instead of having to reinvent the wheel. It's great for speaking pitches and things like that. The other thing that I actually recommend a lot for people for executives that speak, have you ever heard of Talkadot? Yes. Yeah, so it's very cool.

So it's basically a QR code at the end of your talk and people can in real time take their phones out, scan that QR code and answer some very, very brief questions about your talk, both with, you know, was it relatable? Was it valuable? And they can kind of one through five, and then they can also share comments. And it's amazing because you step off of that stage and then you pick up your phone and

you have 250 real-time responses of how your talk went. Because your event organizer is going to find out how your talk went two weeks later when they get all the surveys back. And it's probably going to be very high level. This is in the moment when people are touched and inspired and motivated. And then you have basically this report that you can share. And then you also have sort of an aggregated report where somebody can get a sense of you as a speaker in general and the type of feedback that you get in general. So I love that as a tool for speakers.

Amazing. Yeah. My next question is around a little bit of the process when we approach a new app or a new system or technology, because I find because I'm not confident in this space, I probably overthink, overresearch, overcompare, and I'm, like, worrying. Like, the best example I can give you

is credit card processing platforms. The amount of time I spent researching all the different ones and blah, blah, blah, and mind you, I use it in the most simple, basic way and didn't need all the bells and whistles, and I don't know all the bells and whistles. And I don't know, the five cent difference between one platform and the other, I cost myself way more than that in the amount of time and energy I spent trying to figure it

all out. My question is, when do we fall in the trap of overthinking or over-processing? And how do we prevent ourselves from doing that by looking at a few different options and just sort of deciding what's best for us at the time we're in? Right. What's good enough-ish. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times I will outsource a lot of that research to my assistant. So that's a really nice thing that if you have somebody else on your team to be like, okay, listen, you know, because for example, we just moved our, our community from I have a club called the get it done club, and we just moved it off of Facebook and on to and we wanted to move it on to some other non Facebook community. So it was like circle or heartbeat or mighty networks. And so I just had her kind of do a lot of research and figure out the best option. And then you just kind of go all in on that. Yeah, just kind of doing a bare minimum effective dose of research and then going all in. But I still get Thomo or Grasses

Greener. Like for example, my checkout software is ThriveCart, but then I hear all these people talking about SamCard and it's really the best. But the switching costs of these things is enormous. So I usually find that as long as it's good enough-ish, then I'm going to kind of stay there. But I think in my eight years of being an entrepreneur, I've switched a lot of these big platforms, like moved from Kajabi to ThriveCard. And it's a big mental load to do those switches.

Yeah, I find that too, as I've gotten caught up in the idea that there is a significantly better option and the amount of time we spend switching more often than not is more costly than whatever perceived benefit there are. We switched over from MailChimp over to Flowdesk for our emails. And that has been a much better thing in the transition period was really, really easy. Not that MailChimp was bad and Flowdesk is better. It was just what was better for us.

But back to the amount of time I spent making that decision wasn't worth it. So anyway, is your recommendation to have a few tools that you leverage at a higher level or several tools that you leverage just for what you need them for? Because as you were talking, as an example, I use Google, but I'm probably only using it maybe 20% of its capacity. And then maybe I use another tool for something that Google actually can do. So what is your recommendation, that we get more familiar

with a few tools or that we just specifically find tools for exactly what we need? I tend to err on the side of picking a tool that does a specific thing really well. So like a one password, for example. They are experts at helping you manage your passwords versus, yeah, iCloud Keychain and Google Chrome has a password manager, but they're really, really bare bones, right? And because Google does 6,000 things,

it's not going to do password management really well, right? So I do tend to err on the side of more tools that do things well, really specifically, but I do think there's a huge opportunity like the things that Google can do and the things that Apple can do. For example, like we're just scratching the 10% surface. Like in your Gmail, there's probably 10 different things that you could implement in there that would drastically improve your email that you just don't even know about. Or like Google Chrome bookmarks or things like that or people just not even really understanding things like, oh what

are my different Google profiles and how do they interact with each other? So it's a little bit of both. Okay. You had mentioned earlier about using technology as sort of our free assistance, right? Any other ways that we can be doing this outside of Siri and Alexa, you know? So I think email is such a great example of how you can do it. Like I think of us a lot of times like we're goalies in like, you know, in a soccer game and the score is like a thousand to zero. Like the emails just keep coming and coming and coming and we're just kind of standing there frozen,

watching all of the emails come in. And so, because basically it's like we've hired, if you think about Gmail, like this really smart, eager intern, that's like, I can help, I can help. And it's like, I don't have time to train you. And you just let them keep coming in. But little things like those importance flags that you have in Gmail, that's an opportunity

to tell Gmail, kind of do your future self a favor and say, this is important, this is not important. Things like setting up rules and filters so that, for example, like say we were talking about when you delegate, is there an email that always comes in that's never going to be for you that you're always going to want to forward? Can you have a rule or filter set up so that it will automatically forward it, for example, or at the very minimum, put it in a folder that's called delegate, and then you know to push it out. So I think in our email alone, that's an enormous opportunity to train it and have it act like

an assistant. Can you come do it for me? This is usually the part in the podcast interview where they're like, and I'm going to share my screen and let's just get started. Pretty much. Amanda, is there anything I didn't ask that I should have? When you think of being a busy, overwhelmed working woman with a ton of shit on her plate and digital clutter and free assistance and tech tools, what didn't I ask that I should

have known to? Well, I think the thing that I want people to know is that I have tons of resources available that teach people how to do all of these things. So I actually have a course that is how to make tech your free assistant. And it's my top 10 hacks, which are a lot of what we talked about today. And so if you go to my website indigoorganizing.com, you'll see all of those there. And I even have a little course about Gmail and a little course about bookmarks and things like that.

I think it's really just about, like I said, making things bite-size, figuring out what is the problem that's giving you the most friction, but really understanding that, yes, some of the tools like OnePassword, they might have some investment in time. Like I said, literally, we could sit here right now and spend 10 minutes in your Gmail. And it would be like a miracle compared to what you're trying to deal with now. So I think people just understanding that there are little tricks that they can learn.

Amazing. So we'll put Amanda's website in show notes. But again, it's indigoorganizing.com. And also, you can follow her on Instagram at hey.amandaj. Amanda, thank you. Again, I do wish I could teleport you through my computer and help me with all of this stuff, but I love that you have these resources and many courses to help us figure out how to because it feels daunting and overwhelming, especially for somebody like me who's decided they're not very tech savvy.

So having videos, having something you can watch and implement makes all of the difference in the world. And I'll just say, you know, I work with clients one-on-one. So I literally, you know, we work over Zoom and they share their screen and I have a remote control and we do get in there. So for some people that are out there that are like, yeah, I'm not watching a course about Gmail, just help me. That's an option too.

Amazing. All right. Well, thank you for the work you're doing and for being here today. My brain is spinning, but I have some action items, which feels good. Thank you. Amazing. All right, friend. The goal here isn't to become perfectly organized or to have a color-coded digital life with 47 folders and zero notifications. The goal is to make space for more ease, more clarity, and more time doing the work that actually matters. Because we didn't start our businesses or our jobs to become full-time app testers or

unpaid tech support, right? You have important work to do, the kind that changes lives, and that work deserves systems that support it, not slow it down. Your tech should be your assistant, not your adversary. Let your tech rise to meet you, not the other way around. Because that is woman's work.