Speaker 1: Let me just come front and center and talk to you for a quick second. Now if you've ever signed up for any of these business bundles where you get all kinds of awesome goodies for either a low price or maybe free, or even if you're going along and you just sign up for different courses, how do you keep track of all of these things? Well I have this great little spreadsheet and I'm just going to walk you through how I use this spreadsheet. What's nice about it is two things. You can consolidate all of your information in one place so you know what you've signed up for. Whether it's free or a low cost, something caught your attention and you want to get that information out of it so you can keep track of everything. And I'm also going to share a couple of tips with you just so you can basically monitor your progress. Because it's easy to go down the rabbit hole and we spend all of our time training or learning and never implementing. Or the other, we'll sign up for everything but then we never do anything with it. So let's follow along. In this, there's two tabs here in this spreadsheet. And in this first tab, I'm just talking about how I look at things when I sign up for courses. So it's a six step process. What do I mean by that? When you find something that you're going to log into, then add it to this spreadsheet. So let me just hop over here. So here is a business bundle that I'm actually participating in right now. So if you had signed up for this and you're looking, I mean, you go down and you see all of these courses. Where do you start? Well, the first thing I do is I just do kind of a quick walkthrough of the store, so to speak, you know, just like in your favorite store. And I will look at, okay, maybe, you know, I'll find something that catches my eye. And so, you know, you might just make a list or mentally pay attention. And then when you're ready to sign up for things, so here's one incubator foundations. That sounds kind of intriguing. So I'm going to sign up for that. And when I do, I'm going to come back over here to this spreadsheet. And the second tab down here at the bottom is where I'm going to enter the information. Now before we jump into all of this, I'm going to come back here and let's talk about my method of madness when I do this. So whenever I sign up for something, I create a subfolder in my email system and also on my computer so that, because when you sign up for something, you're going to get those emails saying, thanks for joining, here's the login, here's the password, all of that kind of stuff. So I've created a folder in my email inbox, a subfolder just called online courses. And then you could create subfolders underneath that if you wanted, if you have a whole bunch or if you just have a few, you can just dump them in. So then when I get those emails with the logins and all of that, I can just slide it in there and down the road if I forget or I can't even remember maybe who the person was, the author of the course, I can look in that folder and find it. I also do the same thing on my computer. Now not in my email, just on my computer, I will create a subfolder under a master folder just called online courses I'm enrolled in because a lot of the courses will have workbooks or slide decks or something. Now you could also do this on your Google Drive also. For me, for this kind of stuff, I just leave on my computer. But wherever you want to save it. When I'm going through that course and I want to download things, I know exactly where to go. It's in a subfolder on my computer under online courses. So those are the first two things I do. And then the next thing is I will map out basically my planning schedule. Now if you've ever worked in corporate or in the educational system, usually there's some kind of like continuing ed credits or maybe just on your calendar you're going to block off something. So I will look at the things that I've signed up for and then I will decide what order I want to do my trainings. Now let me hop back over here for a second. In this spreadsheet, I have little drop downs and notice it says if I click on it, it's now, next or future. So in other words, so on this business boost bundle, you know, I'm going to be signing up for 15 or 20. Well once I've signed up for them, then I'm going to go back and I'm going to make a decision of what are the top five. That's probably the most you can handle at one time. The top five courses or many memberships, whatever it is that I want to work on. And I will mark those in my training priority as now. If it's something that I'm going to do next, then I go with the yellow on next and future just means this looks good, it looks interesting, but it's in my future pile. And why am I doing this? Because again, you know, we can't do 50 hours of training every week or we'll never get anything done in our business. So if we create some categories as far as what's important, what do I need to learn right now? Then I can focus on those and then once I'm done, I can move forward. All right, so that's how I do that. Then coming back here, then the next thing that I recommend that you do is actually block off on your calendar 15 to 20 minutes a day for these different programs you've signed up for. So, you know, if I signed up for, let's say a Facebook ads, a little mini course every Monday from 8 to 8.30, I'm going to block off the time to work in that course. Maybe Tuesday from 8 to 8.30, I'm going to work in a second course, all right? So you see what I'm doing here. If we don't schedule it, it never gets done. And when we put it onto our calendar and you can make it a reoccurring appointment with yourself, it's nagging at you. And so sooner or later, you're going to say, okay, fine, let me jump into it and take that training. All right. Then the last little tip is you can create what we call, if you use Google, I'm sure the other browsers have something similar, but I create a folder right on top of my toolbar. Now I think you can see it up here. So you can see that I have little folders here. And if I open that, here are some courses in this biz bundle that I want to take. And so what you can do is when you are on a course, let's just pretend like this is one of my courses, I'm at the login screen. I can come up here to where there's that little padlock, grab that and drag it straight into this folder and then it's there. So why do I do that? It's like another place where that URL is at and I can just move forward with it. So when I'm sitting down at my computer and I want to, I've got maybe 15 minutes between appointments or something, I can just open up that folder, hop into one of those training courses and I'm good to go. So those are the six steps that I go through when I'm signing up for courses. Now let's talk about retention and summary notes. So I'm saying here, if you want, you could create notes on this spreadsheet. So you could create another tab or on the line item next to that particular course, you could write notes and stuff, or you could create a one page summary. Now I caution you, don't overcomplicate it. Don't put so much detail into it that it's like you're writing a dissertation, but just a quick summary. So if you had to tell your best friend, you know, in three minutes or less, what is this course about? What are my favorite takeaways? What were those aha moments? Use that course for that or use that document and then it'll just be a great reminder for you. All right. And then again, remember that by using the spreadsheet, excuse me, you have everything in one place. So let's come back to the spreadsheet and let me just move over here for a minute. So in the biz bundle that I've signed up to, there's different categories. Now you don't have to say what category it is, but I've just, I've got a few different categories here. You can modify those. You can just click the little pencil and modify those. But the category for me is helpful because let's say I want to focus on some marketing and advertising or something, or like I have here, client attraction, whatever it is. As I'm signing up for different courses, is it top heavy? Am I taking five courses about different ways of getting new clients, but yet I know I need to learn about chat GPT, something like that. So it's just a way of categorizing. And then here, notice I would put the name of the course. And so here the category would be client attraction, the actual name of the course. And then here is where I would paste in my login link. Now, you might be saying, isn't that double because you've already added it up here? Because remember I said you can drag that login screen right into the folder. Yes, it's double, but here's why I do it. Occasionally you might decide that you want to actually download this list, print it out. You know, who knows something goes wonky. It's always better to have that like backup master copy of everything. And the other thing is it kind of keeps you in check because if all of a sudden you've got 50 or 100 courses that you're, you know, and we all, no judgment, we've all done it. But when we actually see what things we've signed up for, it helps us kind of put the brakes on when we see that next shiny object, we can say, wait a minute, do I really need this? Let me finish these first. All right. And then the passwords, you can put the full password, or if you use, I use a little acronym and then a little system, a system hack of how I put the last piece of the password. So whatever your password naming system is, if you wanted, you could put the passwords there and then give it a priority. Is this a now, next or future, and then a little completed. If this is completed, you could just check it off. And then, you know, if you wanted to write just some very brief notes, you could. The other thing I like to include is who is the course creator in the details. Sometimes, you know, I might sign up for a course, but later when I go back, I can't even remember what is this? Why did I sign up for it? But if I know who the creator is, you know, I can always do a quick search. It just helps to have some of that detail. So again, it's up to you how much details you put in here. But by having things on this spreadsheet, you've got everything in one place. Now let me come back here to the notes and let me talk about archiving your courses. So once you've taken the course and you're done with it, then what you could do is, remember I said that you've got a folder on your hard drive with current online courses. So once you've completed that, you could create a different subfolder called Completed Online Courses or Online Courses Completed, and then just drag that in there. For me, when I do a little housekeeping like that, and I'm only looking at a list of 10 or 15 current courses that I'm taking or, you know, groups that I'm spending some time learning about something, instead of looking at a list of 50 or 100. So that might help you, and it feels great to check something off. I've completed that, and now I can actually move that folder into my completed folder. One last tip that I want to share with you is the email names. So most products, whether it's free or paid, most people ask for a name and an email. So what I do for my name is I actually attach the name of that course that I'm taking. So the sample is my name might be Deb FB Ads, you know, if it was a Facebook ads course, or Deb FB Ads dash Kate, maybe Kate's the person that is teaching that course, whatever it is, but I like to use my name and connect it with that course name. The other reason that that is useful is because you will get on people's lists. So maybe you've signed up for something free, and you've gotten on somebody's list, and then a month from now, you can't even remember why am I getting emails from this person. But when they use the name field in their email, hey, Deb Facebook ads course, you know, how's it going, then right away, I know exactly why I'm on that list. And then, you know, a lot of times, maybe it doesn't serve you at the moment. And you just, you can go ahead and unsubscribe. All right. So let me just come back over here to this side again, just give you a quick rundown. You can add a category as far as what that training is the course name, the login and the credentials, and set a priority. And then also go to your calendar and schedule these things on your calendar so that you'll continue making progress. Then on this spreadsheet here, you can add notes and any details about your course creator and any details on that. And then also I said create up here on your little bar here, create a folder for your online courses. And then when you have that login, that login page, you just come over here where the key is, or the little padlock, click and drag it right into the folder. And then you've got these here. And then you can rename these also. You can just right click and rename it. So hope that's helpful. Let me know what was your favorite part of this little mini training series. And let's have true confession. Let me know how many courses have you signed up for. Talk to you later.