Speaker 1: It is time to nix the mess and get you organized. Today, we are going to talk through my Google Drive organizational system so that you, my friend, can see how others do it and also be able to take the mess that is your Google Drive and create a very organized structure for yourself moving forward. I'm Amanda Horvath and on this channel, I help eliminate the obstacles to getting you sitting where I'm sitting right now in front of the camera, sharing your message with the world so that you, my friend, can make money online. So if in addition to getting organized on your Google Drive, you would also like to learn how to market yourself online and make money doing it, then be sure to subscribe and check out the helpful resources that are linked in the description below. Now, the system that I'm about to walk you through is by no means perfect, but it definitely works and it has carried me through eight years of entrepreneurship of being pretty much a solopreneur, managing some team members and freelancers and different things like that. This has worked for both my production business that I used to have where I was working with clients to shoot and edit their videos for them as well as my online course business and coaching business that I have today. If that's the kind of business you're in, then this could be very valuable. If you're in another kind of business, stick around. There might be still more that you can get from it, but I just wanted to give you the overview of what I am organizing on my Google Drive in addition to some personal items, which we will be talking about as well. Now, we're going to approach this video in a very conversational way. I'm going to be sharing my screen, walking you through the folders that I have and chatting through the logic behind it so that you can implement this within your own brand. So my friend, the first thing you're going to notice is I have 824 gigabytes stored on Google Drive. That's a lot of storage. And the reason for that is because I'm the kind of person that does not like to keep anything on my actual laptop. And this is a great practice because if your hard drive crashes, then you don't have that devastating moment where you've lost everything. Now, as I previously mentioned, I am also a YouTuber, video marketer as well. And so I shoot a lot of video content. Anything that is not on Google Drive that is like big, big files, like video files, I am going to keep those on external hard drives off of my laptop as well so that those are safe outside of the actual hard drive that I'm using on a day-to-day basis. It also keeps my laptop running very quickly compared to bogging it down with all the kind of things that you put on your hard drive. And if you would like another video on how to organize your video files, I will link to that in the cards as well as in the description below. But let's keep going with your Google Drive. The first tip that I have for you is to start with some core folders at the very top of your Google Drive. And this is just going to reduce the overwhelm whenever you need to find something. These are the core folders that I have used within my business. So we'll start first with the media folder. The reason that this folder is awesome is because more likely than not, if you're someone like me that is going to shoot content, send it to someone across the internet, you're likely going to be sending large files in that process. When you do that, it's a great idea to have a media folder where all of those are going to live. And that's because these are larger files. And at any point in time, if I need to delete and save space on my Google Drive, I can go into this media folder, delete whichever projects are in the past. There are plenty that I could delete right now, but you also don't need to. When you actually get to the point where you need to clear off your storage, you know where to go. The second folder is my operations folder. And technically, this is folder number one. I like to use underscores and numbers at the beginning to easily alphabetize my folders. So this is the operations folder. And what I put in this folder is anytime that I'm working with different employees, which for me are more like freelancers that I hire or agencies that I work with. It's kind of their own standalone team outside of me as a solopreneur. So I'll just have a folder for whoever I'm working with. And then everything that I do with them or any files that they send me will live in that one place. Generally speaking, that will relate to some sort of operation within my business as well, like Instagram or like a marketing agency or something like that. And we'll have some systems that we're working with together. The second thing that I like to put in this folder is anything where I am planning or tracking my progress in my business. So every single year, I'm a big fan of setting goals and making it happen. I love this book currently, The 12-Week Year. That's the system that I've been using to set goals. I will link to that in the description below. Highly recommend it. So I have my templates here. I have my yearly vision exercise that I use every single year to kind of get prepped for the next year. And then I have any sort of documents that fall under that specific year that might be just brainstorm kind of planning sessions or they might be the document that I use on a weekly basis to ensure that I am actually staying on track with my goals. So anything planning and tracking related broken down by the year. Then I also have a folder for systems. So this is something that as solopreneurs or small businesses, it's great to have them and they also change often in your business and that's okay, right? So anytime that you do go and create one, like a, you know, an SOP or something like that, then you can put it into this one folder, systems, and you can break it down into the different parts of your business that you might need to build systems into. That is for the operations folder. And then other is just like anything that you might have started and it doesn't quite go anywhere or whatever. Or like let's say you're organizing your crazy Google Drive that is your current existence and there's something that doesn't seem to fit, but it seems like, oh, maybe it'll fit here and I just want to kind of archive it for later. Always create an other folder so that it's not just hanging out in your core Google Drive. The next up is marketing. And this is anything, any sort of marketing assets that you are creating for your business, like lead magnets. I also include research calls that I love to do within my business. I will link to another video in the cards where I break down how to do research calls for your business. So I like to just have anything that I do for that under this folder for, and under marketing. And then I break it down for the years. And these years are by no means organized within the folders. The deeper the file structure, the folder structure that you get into, the less organized it has to be. It's just having the top being as most organized as possible. And then you can go crazy with whatever you want to put in that year for marketing, right? So like, yeah, content calendar that I have, different like brainstorm that I'm doing, writing Facebook ads or video or however I want to kind of come up with that, that might live in that folder. Then going into the branding. This is the third folder. This is where you're going to include anything that has to do with your actual branding, like the core values that you have, like the big picture of your business, your ideal customer. That's maybe a living document that you're constantly updating to see, you know, you're adding different ideas as you go or whatnot. Anything like that or any exercises that other people have given you that you kind of started on and didn't fully complete, you can keep them in here and you could organize this by years if you wanted to as well. But having it from the beginning can be really helpful to just know, oh, anytime I'm doing a branding exercise, I'm gonna go into my branding folder in Google Drive, right? And I even have old ones here that I've brainstormed in the past. And so it's kind of fun to go back and see the iterations of your business throughout the years. Then we have a bookkeeping one and this is helpful for all of those tax documents that you have, like your EIN number that it's so easy to misplace. Well, screenshot that bad boy, upload it here, whatever it is, make sure your password is secure. I have a cybersecurity client and he would hate if he heard me say that, that you should have your EIN number or anything sensitive for that matter on this. Generally speaking, you know, be safe. So you can have any sort of bookkeeping type stuff in here as well as personal finance documents. I also like to have any sort of like forward projections that I use in this folder as well. So anything that's finance related for my business or for my personal, I keep under the bookkeeping folder. One other helpful thing that I wanna point out in this folder, whenever you're going to pay your estimated taxes for the year, so as a business, you're gonna quarterly, likely you're gonna pay estimated tax. And that can be confusing because it's like, well, what did I previously pay in the previous quarter? You have to keep that document of what you paid and then subtract that from your bottom line to come up with whatever that next amount that you're going to pay for the next quarter is going to be. So what I do for that is I just have a folder for each of the years and then I have the estimated tax that I paid recently within that folder so that I can go and look and say, okay, that's what I paid for last quarter and so now I just need to pay however much more. Ultimately, having everything organized is just gonna help you not have to use your memory, which millennials are probably famous for. All right, so this one is a big one. So if you have clients, this is one of my favorite folders that I go to all the time and it is very incredibly helpful. So I just have it broken down by year and then each year whenever I have a client that books with me, whether it's a video client that I previously had and the other kind of business where I was shooting and editing videos for clients versus a coaching client today or even a human design reading client or whatever it is, I just have a folder with all of their names in there and then any document that I need for that person, I will keep in that folder. So let's say you have a repeat client, you can always go back and see what you covered in the last session with them so that you're tracking and you don't have to, once again, use that memory of yours. Now I'll give you an example of what the actual folder for each client looks like and this is gonna be different depending on your business itself, right? But I'll have a recordings folder so anytime you're gonna record a Zoom session or anything like that, you know where it goes and you can share that with the person so that they don't have to constantly be saving your files, they can just save this as a shortcut in their own Google Drive and then I also like to write down email communication so that I can always go back and see, oh, after this session, this was the to-do item that we decided upon, did we actually do that? So before the next session, I can know that that's what I need to dive into within the next session, right? So it can be really helpful and then anything else that you're sharing with one another can also go into this folder. So the next folder that we are going to cover is the courses folder. Now, if you, my friend, are a course junkie like I am, then you're going to love this. I have taken many, many courses as well as created my own courses. So when I click into the courses folder, I have several different things in here. I have my courses that I have created, which we'll go into in a second. I have any presentations that I've put together. So anytime I get hired to speak or do a presentation to a group, I will put that presentation in here and that's a great way to know that, hey, I need to do a presentation, let me go back and see what I previously talked about so that I can not have to start from scratch, right? Same with workshops. Now, the other courses, the reason I really like this is because when you take courses, which you can see, I've taken a lot of different courses, you're going to be given PDFs and different exercises to go and do for that course. So let's use the example of Digital Course Academy, right? When I open it up, we have the different modules that I'm going to have to walk through and I'll put anything related into that. So if you're someone, once again, that takes a lot of courses like I do, then you can go back to a course that you took years ago and you can look at the exercises that you did for that course and it might actually give you insight into where you are today in your business and you might be able to pull some of those insights from when you were earlier in your business, trying to get it up and running. So I love going back and looking through some older ones and it's very easy to find because I have this folder. All right, so the next folder that I have is for affiliates and partnerships. I won't dive too deep into this because some of you might not have that in your business, but if you're working with clients and they're gonna be giving you lots of materials that you can use to promote their products and services, then anything related to that can go into here. Then I also have a personal folder and so I also use this Google Drive for my personal life. Like I have a journal on here that I love to look at or use on my computer versus having to write by hand, right? I also take Hungarian lessons. So any homework that I might have is in here. Anything related to my human design that I am doing is in here, even though that probably could be underneath business, it's in here. Reflections is where I have all of my journal type stuff, medical bills that I wanna like keep track of or anything that's like non-sensitive to put on Google Drive that's on here as well and whatever else. And then I also have an other folder that just doesn't seem to fit anywhere which is usually just stuff that people have shared with me that I just need to back up on my drive or whatever it is. And so that's the entire structure for keeping my Google Drive organized. It works really, really well and I can always go through and tweak these things to make it even more organized moving forward if there's something that doesn't fit within this structure. But in my eight years of being an entrepreneur, these are the folders that are the most valuable to me. So hopefully it is helpful for you to just take and implement, leave what isn't helpful and get organized, my friends. Now, if you've made it all the way to the end of this video, I would love to know who are you. So go ahead and drop a comment below sharing what you do in your business so that I can know who is watching this video and engage with you because otherwise this can be a lonely experience just talking to a camera in my living room. And if this video is helpful, please be sure to click like letting me know and I will link to several other helpful videos on the screen here that will continue your organization within your business as well as help you get up and running with video so that you, my friend, can market yourself online. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.