Latest / Magic Thread Media / Your Clutter Is Costing You More Than You Think | Miriam Ortiz y Pino

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Your Clutter Is Costing You More Than You Think | Miriam Ortiz y Pino · Magic Thread Media

• 0:00
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: People will say they don't have money to do the things they want to do, but they'll spend $2,000 a month on crap they don't need. So it's it's kind of they buy the things thinking that'll solve the problem instead of figuring out what the problem actually is, finding the solution, and then matching what they purchase to actually do that solution. Especially when it comes to clutter, you know, people will buy a new bin, a new basket, some sort of fancy set of these things that are supposed to magically organize you. And it's like, no, they are to support the system you
• 0:34
  should have already created.
• 0:40
  Amy Lynn Durham: Hey, it's Amy. Welcome to Create Magic at Work, where we cast visions for a future of work where business decisions ripple outward to our teams, our communities, the planet, and humanity as a whole. If you're ready to edge walk instead of sleepwalk through your leadership, you're in the right place. So let's start making magic at work. Did you know that physical, mental, and digital clutter can drain up to 40% of an entrepreneur's daily productivity and energy? On top of that, studies show that over 90% of business owners hold unconscious money blocks that directly
• 1:20
  restrict their earning potential, meaning that our physical space, time management, and financial habits are deeply interconnected. Joining us today is Miriam Ortiz Epino, a simplicity expert, and one of the very first certified professional organizers in the world, with over 20 years of experience, Miriam helps creative entrepreneurs take control of their home, business, and money as a streamlined money breakthrough business coach and a Napo instructor. She bridges the gap between physical organization, flexible systems, and money mindset? I can't wait to get into this. Miriam, welcome to
• 2:10
  Create Magic at Work. Thanks, Amy. I'm really excited for this conversation today. Me too. One of the first things that stood out to me, with obviously the data points I included introducing you, how would we describe these data points? Extremely alarming, I would say. If 90% of business owners are holding unconscious money blocks, and that's directly restricting our potential, and if that's tied to clutter,
• 2:44
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: yes.
• 2:45
  Amy Lynn Durham: Tell us more about that.
• 2:48
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Well, fabulous statistics. I don't know where you got them, but they sound about right. They're verified.
• 2:56
  Yeah, I think especially here in America, we live in a culture where we don't talk about money. You know, it's one of the secret things you're not really supposed to talk about, and yet people go into business and there's all this hubbub about make six figures, make a million dollars, you can do it. It's all about the money, and if you don't bring your values and your desires and your beliefs about money into alignment, you'll never get there. So it's more about understanding your relationship with money. Some people start a business for more freedom, and that requires some money, but often it's
• 3:40
  time freedom, not necessarily the cash freedom, or they started as a second job and they're already set up, so they aren't as worried about money, and they run it more as a hobby situation or a tax write-off, and none of those things necessarily make for a sustainable business. So I think that's a key part of what's missing from the entrepreneurial discussion is how are you relating your life to your money and your business so that it all works together to support you.
• 4:12
  Amy Lynn Durham: I think that's a very insightful thing that you just shared. I would like to hear how you feel about women and money. I have some strong feelings about the coaching space with women and money. I think there's been a lot of woman-on-woman crime when it comes to money mindset courses that other women are claiming to teach other women, and then blaming alignment, or well, you you're not vibing at the right energy level to attract this abundance and things like that. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we keep uncluttered digitally with money, if that's.
• 5:01
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, interesting. No one's asked me before, but I actually agree with you that there's a lot of coaching out there that talk about energetics and alignment in a way I don't. That's not what I meant when I said bring everything into alignment. Alignment to me is that it aligns with your beliefs and your values, not some weird energetic alignment, which will happen automatically if you're paying attention to your numbers and they're in alignment with your values and your beliefs. That will automatically put the right frequency out into the universe. But as all
• 5:37
  things in the secret or whatever you want, the keys or whatever methodology you follow, it is about the action. You believe something and you offer it up to the universe, but you have to do the practical steps. And I find that women are very afraid. They were told they weren't good at math. They were told that they're worth less. They were brought up to rely on the men, and so they don't have the same relationship with money. It's not about earning; it's much more tied to their self worth. And if you don't have great self worth, you can't break through that thing. But one of the
• 6:16
  fastest way to get the self worth is to understand your numbers and your money, and how to read a bank statement or a financial statement, and understand credit, and you know those very practical steps. And so, that's what I mean by bringing it into alignment. Your behaviors need to follow your beliefs and your values, so that it all works together instead of just skipping two of the steps because you were told you were bad at math 20 years ago, right?
• 6:43
  Amy Lynn Durham: And for me, I think one of the biggest pieces of advice that I would give to somebody leaving the corporate space and starting their own business would be completely different than the advice I was given or what I did when I left the corporate space. It was at an interesting time. The pandemic occurred, and the coaching space just blew up. And there was a lot of chatter about trusting the process and attracting the right energy, and you have to have your money wounds healed, and all of these things. Meanwhile, I mean, this was about six years ago. Meanwhile, I hadn't even
• 7:25
  hired a bookkeeper, and I'm coming from a w2 space where it's such a different world. And I knew I needed one, but I was like, "Oh, like you know, I just need to get my money wounds healed. My very first advice to anybody in this space, if we want to talk about money and digital clutter, would be get yourself a great bookkeeper and get yourself a great CPA, get yourself a great accountant, and then if things are flowing and you're watching your numbers, just like you said, I love your advice that it's automatically going to align you. Then okay, step into a a course if you feel like that's
• 8:05
  going to uplift you anymore. Tell us about your clutter money connection. Tell us what you talk about with that.
• 8:13
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: People will say they don't have money to do the things they want to do, but they'll spend $2,000 a month on crap they don't need. So it's kind of they buy the things thinking that'll solve the problem instead of figuring out what the problem actually is, finding the solution, and then matching what they purchase to actually do that solution. Especially when it comes to clutter, you know, people will buy a new bin, a new basket, some sort of fancy set of these things that are supposed to magically organize you, and it's like no, they are to support the system you
• 8:48
  should have already created. So I can't tell you how many of my clients have a bookshelf or an area that was designed to hold the things, and the things that were to hold the stuff they were going to put on the shelf are in front of the shelf, so you can't reach the shelf to put anything back on the shelf because the things they bought to do it don't fit on the shelf, right? It's like then they throw their hands up and go, "It didn't work, and now I don't know what to do. I guess I need to buy new shelves instead of lose the containers. Put the things on the shelf first, and then go find
• 9:19
  containers that'll actually make it pretty if you need it to go a step farther. But I think there's just a real disconnect between how much time you have to spend working to afford the thing you just bought on your credit card, and how much more it actually costs because of the interest. I don't have a problem with anybody buying anything if it works for their budget and their lifestyle and solves the problem they were looking to solve. I'm not a big budgeter. I'm a loose budgeter. Like I give my money a job, but I don't necessarily like. I only have $4 in. 67 cents left at the end of the week
• 10:02
  because my budget was only this much or whatever. It's a little bit looser than that, but you have to kind of designate where you're going to send your money, and you have to connect that thing you just bought. People buy cars, right? That are like $100,000 cars, and they make $60,000 a year, and you're like, "Wait, did you not realize you have to work over two years without buying anything else to afford that car? Like, there's those disconnects out there right now that I think are much more of a problem.
• 10:38
  Amy Lynn Durham: So, what are some ways we can clear out physical or digital space to open the door to building wealth?
• 10:51
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: I tend to think of digital space as physical space. It's just in there. It's in that cabinet, like the
• 10:59
  Amy Lynn Durham: computer. You mean? Yeah,
• 11:02
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: but it's still physical clutter. It's still there. So what you want to do is is figure out systems. I use a five essential system framework. There's five essential systems for your home, and there's five essentials for running a business. And there's a little bit of overlap, but mostly, if you get these areas working well, it kind of self solves the stuff. The digital clutter allows for a lot of avoidance. Oh, there's room. I haven't run out of storage, so I can keep adding to it. So instead of ever glancing through or curating your photos, you have 200,000 photos,
• 11:43
  not actually that helpful. You pay your bills online, but you don't download your bank statements. What happens if you need to look at one? You have to go back into the bank account. What happens if your bank sells and there's this period of time where you can't look at your statements, which happened to me last year. There was like the six week thing as they transferred banks where things were not consistently available. So you want to make sure that you are looking at the information you're getting digitally to still use it for strategic decision making, not just go, oh, that bill got
• 12:18
  paid. Okay, great. Was it out of the right account? Was it on the right day? What was the date? Do you have enough money to cover it? Do you need to transfer other money to cover it? What's going on with that information? And if you have a place to put it, so there's a workflow. You get the email. You put the. You go download the statement. It goes into a specific folder. It's much easier, and you're not relying on search because if you type in statement to search, you'll get every statement you've ever had attached to an email.
• 12:52
  Amy Lynn Durham: Good tips. Good tips. What are some of the most common unconscious money blocks that you see holding
• 13:00
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: entrepreneurs, business owners, people, leaders, back. Yeah, not investing in help early enough, and thinking I will take care of getting that system together when I have time, and they're both connected, right? It's I have to bootstrap this. I have to struggle. I have to grind all these things instead of, well, what would it take for me to do that? To achieve that, are there enough hours in the day for me to do it, or do I actually need help? Do I have the technical knowledge to do that? Often people are back to the coaching thing, especially women, we invest in yet
• 13:43
  another coach or another solution, thinking, "Well, I took that course and it didn't change anything. And then I ask them, "Well, did you do the work? Did you actually follow the steps and go through it? Did you fine tune it? Did you adjust it? We can't give up, but at the same time, we can't keep investing in a different solution until we know that solution didn't work. And just hearing about it is only the first layer. I feel, and you got to go. You have to actually experience it by trying it before you dismiss it as not the right solution for me. In my opinion, if somebody's listening and
• 14:22
  they feel just completely overwhelmed, like it's done, like they can't do anymore, what's one way that they can start to rewrite their story? Yeah, first off, go take a nap and walk around the block, or farther. If you're near the woods, go hike in the woods. I think it's really important to remember when you start a business, you are creating that business, and so you should create it the way you want it. It doesn't have to look like anyone else's, but it still needs to have some marketing. It needs to have some people coming through the door. It has to have something consistent that you sell,
• 14:58
  and you have to have a way. For people to pay you and for you to pay your bills, that's it, right? That's all it takes to run a business. But most people just go, "Oh, I'm going to create this thing, and when it's perfect, people will just automatically buy it. Okay, did you market it? I posted on Facebook three times. That's not quite enough. So I think a lot of people spend a lot of time doing busy work. So evaluate what your end result you want is, and the fastest way to a new client is always to hop on the phone. I don't care who you are, call people.
• 15:37
  Amy Lynn Durham: Love it,
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  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: yeah, love
• 15:39
  Amy Lynn Durham: it. Let's talk about physical clutter in the home. How do you help people? You have over 20 years of organizing experience. What is the biggest misconception people have about why their homes get cluttered, and how does our physical environment affect our energy?
• 16:00
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Okay, I would say most people blame other people in the household for the clutter, and it's almost always a combination of everybody in the household. So, get real. Did you actually think through where you decided to store things in your house, or did you store things by shape? Like, oh, there's not enough room in this cabinet. I'll just put it in this cabinet instead. Or does it actually support a workflow you need to do if you're cooking and all your your right handed and all your utensils are on the left side of the stove? It might actually be problematic more
• 16:38
  than you think. If you forgot to tell your kids and your husband where to put the mugs when they empty the dishwasher, you're never going to be happy with where the mugs are. So, know that a system is set up for placement functionality to support the workflow of what you need to do with the items you are keeping, and then I would say they don't realize it's decision. They don't see the connection that it's decision fatigue that leads to not putting things away. You set them down for now, or oh, this is something brand new. I just bought at the store. I didn't make a plan for where I would keep
• 17:20
  it. I'll just set it here for now. Oh, I'm too tired after a long day. I'm gonna deal with this later. I'll just set it here for now. And pretty soon you have piles and piles and piles of things you set up for just for now. And then someone says they're coming over, and what do you do? You scoop everything off the table, throw it in some bags, toss it in the bottom of the coat closet, and panic wipe everything down, right? So, think about how you live and why is your space? Why are you and your family not worthy of having a lovely, delightful space to live in? Why are you allowing things to
• 18:00
  be in your way on a day-to-day basis that frustrates everybody and makes everybody cranky, right? It's a bigger picture of all the things, but really, it's a matter of making better decisions. And you just start with one thing. Making one decision is way better than ignoring everything until you have time to make 80 decisions, and try to leave things better for next time. I like that. It's really strange. People have no trouble knowing that ice cream lives in the freezer, but they can't put a pencil back in a pencil cup. Like, how is it different? That's where they live, right? It's sometimes
• 18:44
  it's just these simple things, like, oh, are you really too lazy to just set it into the cup that's two inches from where you left it on the desktop? I don't know. Maybe you're more of a troy person. That's fine too. But you know what I mean. Decide where something lives and keep it there, except when you're using it, and then put your toys away.
• 19:05
  Amy Lynn Durham: For those of us that our homes double as workspaces, what are some ways that we can mitigate the chaos in our physical environment to affect our energy,
• 19:22
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: yeah. So it's important to have a defined space to do your work. I get that not everybody has a separate room to do that, but what you want to do is the workspace itself, the desk, get set up for that. If you're using the dining room table or the kitchen counter, it needs to be portable, so you bring the things you need to do your work, and then you have a way to put them away into a kit of some sort that is portable, stashable, scoot out of the weighable. It's important to just distinguish the time and the space. So these are my work hours. This will be out during
• 19:58
  work hours, and then I have to clean up. The dining room table, so that everybody can eat dinner. It's a rotation or a reset, if you will. But if you're lucky enough to have a dedicated space, by all means, go all in and make it an office that inspires you. There is a fine line between inspiration and overwhelm, though. You put too many motivational things up, or too many creative ideas around, and you can't think anymore. So I'm a real big fan of a clear work surface. So you always have enough room for notebook or a binder in front of your computer, and enough room to set a piece of paper
• 20:44
  on either side of your keyboard, and that's enough room to do most work. But yeah, you and pay attention to what motivates you to work. Are you better at certain activities in the morning or the evening, afternoon, whatever it is, and what do you need daily should be on the desk, and anything else should be adjacent.
• 21:11
  Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, those are all such good tips, and I know people's wheels are going to start turning on how they can be more decluttered in that way because it does give you a shift in your energy when you when things are more organized around you.
• 21:30
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: It does. If you get interrupted or distracted by something else in your environment, it can take up to 17 minutes to refocus on what you were doing.
• 21:39
  Amy Lynn Durham: Wow, that's
• 21:40
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: a lot of time. That is, let me do the math real quick. I feel like it's two weeks a year.
• 21:48
  Amy Lynn Durham: Wow,
• 21:49
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: yeah. If it happens just once a day, and it happens more than that. So, oh yeah,
• 21:54
  Amy Lynn Durham: especially in the way we live right now, where our attention is pulled all over the place everywhere we go, social media, phone, this, that. There's so much going on, that is such a great highlight for people to listen to. Without breaching confidentiality, tell us the worst case situation you've ever seen.
• 22:17
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: I've worked with hoarders, so that's always difficult. It is an actual diagnosable mental condition that isn't always helpful to help people declutter when they're hoarders. It requires a multidisciplinary approach, and it can actually do more harm than good if you go in and just start throwing things away for them. It's very much they need to learn to make the decisions, and they have to experience the discomfort of that. So that's always heartbreaking and difficult. Sometimes gross. I don't work with very many of them anymore because bottom line is they don't
• 23:04
  actually want help, which is hard.
• 23:09
  Amy Lynn Durham: But I think there's something for all of us to learn from that. Is the doing it yourself piece because we could hire somebody to come in, but if they just come in while we're off at work and do the whole organizing thing, it's just going to go back to the way it was before. If we're not making this conscious effort to change how we operate, so thoughts on that?
• 23:32
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, I totally agree. People often want me to do it for them, and I'm like, great. In two weeks, it'll be back to where you are today or worse, and they don't understand. I'm like, I would organize it the way I think. I can ask you a bunch of questions, but we're in the moment, and I see your reactions to where things are and what faces you're making about your clothes and what lights you up. I can't know how you think about your things and how you use your things. We need to do it together to create the system that'll last for the rest of your life. I create systems
• 24:08
  for people that 20 years later they're still using them. I've been using the same system for 35 years on some aspects and others like 45 years. So if you go through the steps in the right order and work with someone that knows options for you, you will get a much better result. And it becomes plug and play. If you ever have to move, even within your own house, like if you have to switch your office to a different room, you know where things go. Still, the furniture moves to a different room, or the books might shift on the bookshelf. But you still know what you need to do your work, and
• 24:48
  you still know the system. It might just be in a slightly different spot in the new space. So, speaking of systems, is there a system?
• 25:01
  Amy Lynn Durham: That you can share with us that helps us gain control over our schedules. All of us busy workers that feel overwhelmed by our schedules
• 25:13
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: do less. I think the biggest mistake people make with their schedules is they schedule down to the minute and don't leave any buffer. And then, second is they don't review their schedule. They put it in the computer, on their digital calendar, on their phone, and they don't look at the bigger picture of the day. So they might make an appointment. They don't have time to get there. They don't have time to get back to the thing. They haven't scrolled and zoomed out. They don't know how it fits with the rest of their week. I think we've lost the ability to zoom out and look
• 25:46
  at the 30,000 foot view on a regular basis. I'm a big fan of looking at your calendar every single morning and every single evening, and preparing your brain and having your unconscious solve some of the problems while you sleep by knowing what you're supposed to do tomorrow, and to look weekly at the whole week and see where you have some cushion, where you have some adjustment space as things come up. But really, we do too much. We try to do too many things in a day, and so learn to say no.
• 26:25
  Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, and especially with AI, you can do so much more, and it's causing people to do more work because they can, rather than taking a step back and giving ourselves that break.
• 26:40
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, what if we thought of AI as the thing that could give us some time freedom? Oh my gosh, I needed to do all these things. This is how much I intended to do. I just did it in you know with an hour to spare because AI saved me an hour. Now I can do something I enjoy, something strategic, something relaxing, something creative, rather than oh, I can just do more. I think probably two thirds of the work that I see most entrepreneurs do is busy work. They're like fidgeting with a website. They're scanning business cards. They're doing something silly. They're making a
• 27:21
  new spreadsheet. It's like, why? I'm all for having the right tools for the job, but often they're just moving information from here to there, or checking out a new app because it's supposed to solve the problem, but they never got in the habit of using the old one, so it's not going to work on the new one either. Those kinds of busy work type things. So, how do we break that pattern? Know what you're trying to create and reverse engineer it, and understand that habits require practice. You don't give up after the first time something doesn't work. You say, "What's working? What's not?
• 27:59
  People will ask me what CRM I recommend, and like I don't know. What do you need your information to tell you? Because it depends. I have a very simple one. It allows me to send some emails and has little action list of what I do every day. But I don't have a complicated business. If I was running Teams and had more employees and all kinds of things. I'd have and a Salesforce. I'd have a completely different style of CRM. So knowing how you're going to use the information will answer which one is right for you.
• 28:34
  Amy Lynn Durham: Any final piece of advice for someone listening that might feel completely overwhelmed by money, their business, or their home.
• 28:45
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, I would say it doesn't actually matter where you start. Just pick something and make small baby steps. If it's a sock drawer, if it's your entry hall table, if it's your desk, clean out your wallet. Something small that gives you a win. Every little bit, every incremental improvement leads to exponential results. So you just do one small piece at a time. As it frustrates you is another good way of looking at
• 29:17
  Unknown: it. Oh,
• 29:17
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: that was so frustrating! I don't ever want to do that again. Don't ever do that again. Fix it.
• 29:23
  Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you for that insight. It does feel good when you do that. I'll go back and look like, oh, this looks so good. Feels so good when I organize things. Yeah, and it
• 29:31
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: closes a feedback loop in your brain and makes you feel more capable because you actually did something.
• 29:36
  Amy Lynn Durham: There you go. All right. Well, I'm going to pull in a card from the Create Magic at Work Journal Prompt Card Deck, and everybody knows you can find these at magicthreadmedia.com under the Experience tab. This one's just like flying out. Okay, this is I didn't think we would get this for the show, but for this one, but we got Making a Difference. Ooh, let me. Yeah, we got making a difference. That's the message. The affirmation for this is so good. I mean, I feel like this is so good because we're talking about making a difference with ourselves and how we show up in the world.
• 30:15
  And the affirmation is: each day, I send a ripple effect into the world, and that is enough. I would really, for all of us listening, each day I send a ripple effect into the world, and that is enough with my organization, with my decluttering. Just like you said, start with your wallet, start with something, send that little ripple effect. It's it's literally pulling off that energy of what you just said, Miriam. I'm going to ask you a question on the fly from the card. Oh, this is interesting. There's two. I feel like you already answered the first one because this, the first one is, what
• 30:52
  can I do to send a ripple effect into the world? And I feel like you answered that by saying, like, start small, right? Yep, start with something. The next one
• 31:00
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: is, how can I show up and be of service to others? How can we help each other with this? Yeah. Okay, so this goes back to the aligning your actions with your values and your beliefs. If being in connection with others is important to you, make the time for that. Stop saying you're too busy to show up for your friends and family. What is more important than the people? And if you need to let go of some busy work to do that, if you need to look into hiring someone, and nothing's instantaneous. All of these little things take a little bit of time to set up and let go, and
• 31:42
  then you will be able to show up more fully. But start by showing up for yourself. What is one thing you've been wanting to do that you haven't given any attention to lately? And give 10 minutes, whether it's meditating, exercising, talking with a friend, just being alone for a few minutes, 10 minutes, do it today before you go to bed.
• 32:06
  Amy Lynn Durham: That's so good. Like the 10 minutes, I so needed to hear that today. Also, on the note of showing up and being of service to others, if we notice someone in our life that seems to be a bit cluttered in their business, with their money, in their home. How can we show up for them?
• 32:32
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: I don't know why I keep thinking go to my Substack, but I think
• 32:37
  Amy Lynn Durham: that works. Yeah, give
• 32:39
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: them some grace. Don't point out that, geez, this place is a mess or anything like that. But hey, I've been noticing this in my own life. Have you noticed it in yours? Like, start the conversation about what we're doing to ourselves. I think is the best way to approach that.
• 33:01
  Amy Lynn Durham: What's your Substack?
• 33:03
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Morethanorganized.substack.com. It's where I go on these deeper tangents with my work.
• 33:12
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:12
  Amy Lynn Durham: Well, I'll have to go follow you on your Substack. Say it again. Morethanorganized.substack.com.
• 33:18
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yep, that's it.
• 33:20
  Amy Lynn Durham: And if people want to work with you and get some help in their business, home, or money, how can they connect with you?
• 33:30
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: That is easiest to do through my website, morethanorganized.net. There are descriptions of my services and various ways to work with me, and you can book a call to have a discovery session to see what the best solution for you is.
• 33:45
  Amy Lynn Durham: And what's your podcast? You have a podcast.
• 33:48
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, it is on the Substack. It's called Simple Enough. It's also available on all the places you get your podcasts. So yeah, it's getting great feedback so far. So I'm really excited.
• 34:01
  Amy Lynn Durham: Simple enough with Miriam Ortiz Epino. I saw your podcast and it looks very organized. It's very clean. It's very yeah. Simple enough. Yeah, it looks great. Well, Miriam, thank you so much for being a guest on Create Magic at Work today and help helping all of us bring more magic to our lives by getting organized.
• 34:24
  Miriam Ortiz y Pino: Yeah, thanks for having me, Amy. This was really fun.