Solopreneur Tips to Reduce Clutter, Regain Time, and Enrich Your Life

Watch the Episode on YouTube

This episode is a game-changer for anyone feeling the relentless squeeze of time constraints.

Our guest, Andrew Mellen, claims to have the power to give you back an entire hour every day for the rest of your life. Yes, you heard that right—an extra hour daily! The impact of meeting Andrew is nothing short of transformative. Get ready to reshape the way you think, feel, and interact with time, money, and stuff. 

In this episode, we'll unravel the secrets behind Andrew's success and learn:

• Andrew's journey to Organizational Guru
• Quick, easy, and sustainable productivity hacks
• Procrastination prevention tips

Plus so much more.

Get ready to revolutionize your approach to productivity and reclaim control over your precious time. Tune in now!

Connect with Andrew Mellen

• Subscribe to Andrew's channel on YouTube.
• Follow Andrew on Facebook.
• Connect with Andrew Mellen on LinkedIn.
• Follow Andrew on Instagram.
• Follow Andrew on X.
• Visit andrewmellen.com to learn more and access his books.

Favorite Quotes:

“Inside every disappointment is the seed of an equal or greater opportunity"

Going solo in business doesn't mean you're alone! Join our thriving Facebook community group exclusively designed for solopreneurs!  Connect with like-minded individuals who understand the unique challenges and triumphs of running a business single-handedly. Gain valuable insights, discover proven strategies, and unlock the power of networking as you engage in lively discussions and receive expert advice. We hope to see you there!

About Andrew Mellen

Andrew Mellen, organizational “guru", is the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of "Unstuff Your Life!," "The Most Organized Man in America's Guide to Moving," and the acclaimed new book "Calling Bullsh*t on Busy.” He’s renowned for his direct, playful and no-nonsense approach to decluttering, organizing, and productivity.

With an impressive client list, including American Express, Goldman Sachs and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew empowers his clients to transform their mindset and habits, leading to reduced clutter, regained time, and enriched lives.

His unique teaching style reframes organization and productivity as learnable skills, inspiring clients to take responsibility for their actions and break through limiting beliefs holding them back.

Andrew’s deep integrity and compassionate guidance helps individuals and businesses embrace simplicity, reduce friction, and find lasting happiness and organizational success.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on Apple Podcasts Thanks!

Full Episode Transcript

Andrew Mellon (00:00):

Know what your core values are, so that when you have to make a decision, it's not based on your feelings in the moment, it's not based on anything other than what is important to me.

Intro (00:16):

Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast, the show for solopreneurs, consultants and contractors who are ready to take charge of their business and reclaim their freedom. Join us as we bring you inspiring stories, invaluable insights and practical strategies from successful solopreneurs and industry experts, empowering you to create a thriving business that aligns with your unique goals and allows you to live life on your own terms. Here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries.

Carly Ries (00:46):

Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries.

Andrew Mellon (00:50):

And I'm Joe Rando.

Carly Ries (00:52):

We work with solopreneurs all day, every day to help them build a business while living a life they want. Something we hear time and time again is that there just aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done that they want to get done. So listeners, if this sounds like you, you are listening to the right episode, because our guest today says he can give you back one hour a day for the rest of your life. They say that when you meet Andrew Mellon, the way you think, feel, and interact with time, money, and stuff, will change forever, guaranteed. So if that doesn't leave you wanting more, I don't know what will. Andrew, we are so excited to have you. Welcome to the show.

Andrew Mellon (01:33):

Thanks. It's great to be here with you.

Carly Ries (01:35):

I am so excited for this. I feel like this speaks directly to me. Joe and I have both gone through moves this year. We have family stuff. So much is going on and I'm like "that one hour sounds so sweet". Andrew, we have your official bio, but will you tell us a little about your background and how you became the organizational guru?

Andrew Mellon (02:02):

Yeah, I'm hardly Tony Robbins and I do love that he came out with that movie, "I'm not your guru." It's such a funny, east/west kind of thing, right? I am a subject matter expert and nobody should be worshiping at my feet. Having said that, 27 years ago, I was laid off from a theater in Seattle, Washington. I got a gig co-producing an award ceremony at the Kennedy Center. One of our awardees was a Nobel Peace Prize winner based in New York. I went to New York to get some photographs. They were a mess. In the process of pulling things together, they said, "would you like to organize our photographs for us?" I was looking for work. I mean, this was a short term gig in DC, so I needed work when I got back to New York. I was like, sure, I'd love to do this for you. Long story short, I never went to work for them. They scheduled, rescheduled, scheduled, rescheduled three or four times, and then they said, "when we're ready to proceed we'll get back in touch with you". So never went to work for them, but I told everybody I got this great gig. I'm going to create a comprehensive photographic archive for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. That led to a friend referring me to her accountant who needed a filing system. I built that for her. She started referring clients of hers to me. People would show up on my doorstep, literally with a duffel bag full of receipts saying, I've got letters in here from the IRS. I haven't filed my taxes in five years. I'm freaked out. I don't want to go to jail.

(03:25):

Can you make sense out all this paperwork before something really bad happens? I'd organize the receipts, give it back to the accountant, the accountant would file their taxes and they would tell all their friends, "you'll never believe it. I gave this guy a pile of garbage, he turned them into my tax returns. He's a genius." Inevitably somebody would say, I need somebody just like that. Who is this guy? How do I get this guy? And that's how this practice began. I didn't plan to do what I do, and for many years I was a solopreneur. I have a little team now, but this was a service practice. I was going into people's homes and offices, helping them get organized, declutter, solve problems, remove roadblocks, obstacles, and over time it developed into what it is today.

Carly Ries (04:10):

So let me ask you this, because you were saying people were showing up on your doorstep with receipts in hand and you made magic and turned them into tax returns and everything. When you say that, to me that sounds so time consuming, but obviously you are all about making things not time consuming. Do you have any quick and easy ways to boost productivity by doing less and saving that time?

Andrew Mellon (04:35):

Well, sure. There are a couple of things there. One is never solve the same problem twice. If this is a recurring thing that you're going to do, you need to immediately record some sort of an SOP for you. Whatever the breadcrumbs are so that you're not wasting the time trying to figure out how to solve something more than once. If it's a repeatable task, then you need to document how you connected the dots, and then you can get into all that revision analysis of, okay, well if it took me nine steps to do this this time, are there any of these steps that could be compressed? Could I do it in seven? Could I do it in six? Could I do it in five? Can I trim some time off of those five steps? That's the process of refining how long anything takes. Whether it's doing a load of wash or running an errand to the post office or making your bed or writing a blog post, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

(05:34):

If you're going to do it more than once, document it and then follow the roadmap. Specifically when it comes to organizing the receipts, I mean for so many of us, depending on your relationship with money and paper, it's easy to punt that down the field and say, oh, not now. There are too many other things for me to do. I'll deal with it at the end of the year. You're going to pay now or you're going to pay later. I don't mean financially pay, like money pay, you're going to pay with your time. It's going to be so much easier to do your books on a monthly basis than to blow it off for 12 months than look through a bunch of receipts and try to figure out, what did I spend money on in March? The receipt's a little faded. I can't quite figure it out.

(06:19):

I put it in the business expense folder, so it must be something that I should be able to claim, but I can't make it out. All of that's wasted time. You could have, when you spent the money, scribble a note on the receipt, put it in your folder, enter it into QuickBooks, put it in a spreadsheet, record it in some way. It's always, not many things are all or nothing, but it will always cost you less time to do it in the moment than to defer it and do it later. Because in the moment you're present for what it is and later you have to spend a certain amount of brain power to recreate Where was I? What were the circumstances to try to make sense out of it, in addition to the task itself. In the moment, you're only doing the task itself. Later, you have to put yourself back into the mindset you were in when it occurred, and then you can document what it was. So all of the recreation time is just wasted time.

Joe Rando (07:25):

I just have a question on that because what you're saying makes complete sense, but there's a little bit of a dance with that kind of not interrupting your day to do relatively small, but not really small tasks. Let's take the example of recording some kind of a financial expenditure. If I did that every time I went online and signed something up and then had to go in and put it in QuickBooks, it might interrupt my day more than if I stored these things, did them once a day or once a week. Do you have any recommendations for how to think about that?

Andrew Mellon (08:03):

Totally, and I am sorry that I was not more specific. I appreciate you dialing into that. I don't literally mean in the exact moment, but I would batch it for the end of the day. I wouldn't wait longer than the week to be up. You don't necessarily want to ping pong back and forth between higher value activities and just recording the expense, and if there is nothing else happening that's pressing on your time in that moment, take the time then to record it. But certainly I don't feel like there would be a noticeable loss if you batched that at the end of the day or even at the end of the week. Just book 30 minutes with yourself to just boom, boom, boom. It's a money recording block of time, and we're just going to knock all of that out the next 30 minutes. That would be totally fine.

Carly Ries (08:57):

How do you recommend staying accountable for that? Let's say you have 30 minutes on a Friday, but then, oh, it's Friday afternoon, I could be doing this instead. How do you stick with it? I think that would be my issue.

Andrew Mellon (09:10):

So if you have some way that you can leverage external accountability, whether that's a colleague, if you've got an assistant, a partner, anything probably more than a companion animal. They'll be the first one to invite you to go do something other than whatever it was that you had committed yourself to doing, but somebody who can hold you accountable. Certainly if there's external accountability, that's a great thing. If you've got an accountability buddy or an accountability partner. If you belong to any sort of a mastermind or some way that there's external accountability, you can leverage and text them and say, Hey, I'm setting the timer for 30 minutes. I totally don't want to do this. It's a beautiful day outside and I want to go skiing, or I want to go for a walk, or I want to go ride my bike and I'm committed to getting this done and getting it done as quickly as possible. The brain science tells us you're three times more likely to do it when you leverage external accountability. If you can triple the likelihood that you're going to do something just by pre ratting yourself out and going on notice that I'm going to do this. My intention is to do this and I'll ping you when I'm complete, you're just that much more likely to do it

Carly Ries (10:28):

On the other side of the accountability coin, there is procrastination. You may want to do it, but you just keep pushing it off. Do you have any tips to avoid procrastination?

Andrew Mellon (10:39):

Many people have heard Mark Twain's "Eat a Frog" quote that then Brian Tracy took and turned into a little animated video and wrote a book about. The idea "if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, the rest of the day gets better." The irony about procrastination, the thing that is so annoying about it is that the thing that we want to spend the least amount of time with, we often end up spending the most amount of time with because we keep dragging it around behind us. It is just one of those, eat the frog, just do it. The average adult tells 200 lies a day. One of those lies is the frog's going to be tastier in the afternoon. I'm going to batter fry it. I'm going to put some cocktail sauce on it. It's going to be so much tastier than it's going to be first thing in the morning, but the reality is, get it out of the way as quickly as possible, and then everything else that you have any sort of resistance around that goes away.

(11:34):

Referencing back to Tony Robbins, several years ago I did "unleashing the power within". You walk on the hot coals in the middle of the parking lot at 12:30 in the morning. It's a genius thing to do. Anything like that. For me, I can always bring that forward. If I'm confronted with something that I don't want to do either because I find it unpleasant or because it's confounding, I'm confused, I'm overwhelmed. I'm having feelings. I just remind myself. I walked on hot coals in the middle of the Staples Center parking lot. I can handle this. Whatever that is for you, what are those things that you can pull forward and go like, I gave birth to a child, I buried a parent. I got married, I got divorced, I attended a PTA meeting, I wrote a book. Chances are you've done something more onerous than this thing that you're avoiding, and if you can just channel and grab onto one of those achievements and say, well, if I did that, I can certainly handle this. That's a way to leverage internal accountability rather than a form of external accountability.

Carly Ries (12:44):

Yeah, that makes sense. So the other question that I had is earlier we were talking about batching things, saving things till the end of the day, the week. We all have that little thing called email that sometimes it's hard to save for the end of the day and obviously not at the end of the week because oh my goodness, what if you didn't you respond within 24 hours! I went through a phase where I was checking it three times a day, but I really was letting things fall through the cracks when I was doing that. I also don't want to be glued to my phone or my laptop. What advice do you have for all of us?

Andrew Mellon (13:21):

So there is not a one size fits all answer to this question. Everybody has different jobs, roles, businesses. You get to decide where that tension point is for you. If three times a day was not enough for you, for you to be missing things, there are a couple of things that you can do. First of all, are there common kinds of emails that an autoresponder could address? Do you have rules and filters running that are moving things out of your inbox that don't need to be in your inbox? Any sort of subscriptions or things like that, that are cluttering up your inbox and obscuring the things that you actually need to see?

(14:15):

Could you check email five times a day, which is still not every hour, if you did it every 90 minutes. I would keep experimenting with where is the tension between that's too long to wait and this is too frequent. If I do it every hour, there's one new email that actually needs my attention. It's not worth it for me to stop what I'm doing to go do that. 90 minutes is the breaking point, or a hundred minutes or two hours, I can go that long and then I have to address it. It's an opportunity for each us to look at where is that tension point so it's taught but not snapping and not loosey goosey. Find that for yourself. It's just a little bit of paying attention and then refining that. Again, we could call it an SOP for checking your email. I would also look at how can you leverage any email app or program to support you so that there are fewer things in your inbox that actually need your attention. Anything that you're subscribing to that's either a "need to know" or a "want to know", but not actual correspondence from a human being. Get that stuff out of your inbox with a rule or a filter. Get it off into some sub folder and out of your way immediately. How can you leverage auto responders. Maybe you've got a series of FAQs that everybody gets. Some people might find it annoying, but everybody gets the response. If you're asking about this, you'll find it here. If you want to know about this, you'll find it here. What about this? You'll get that there. Otherwise, whenever this lands in my inbox, within two to three hours, you'll get a live response from me, and that's basically your autoresponder or your signature.

Carly Ries (16:08):

That's smart.

Joe Rando (16:09):

I like that because you're really talking about setting expectations too. It's one thing to dodge the question, but just setting those expectations, and you have a lot of people in your life, at least I did, that were like, "I'm setting an email. I expect a response in 10 minutes", and I kind of just weaned people into understanding. You're not going to get a response from me that quickly. My head's down, I'm working, and if it's really important, send me a text. Call me on the phone. If you don't have my phone number, I probably don't care enough to want to respond quickly.

Andrew Mellon (16:41):

There's also that boundary thing. There's that thing about being clear that it's your time. It's a finite resource, and you can spend all day people pleasing everybody else and getting to the end of your day and thinking, crap, I was crazy busy today and nothing that mattered to me actually got done. Everybody else is happy and now I'm going to do my real work. Now that everybody's done bothering me, I can do my real work. Well, that is not a sustainable model for anybody's happiness or success.

Carly Ries (17:11):

I'm glad you said it was all specific to a person. Joe, I don't even know if I told you this, but I took my work email off my phone. Because then it's like, okay, when I'm in front of my computer, I'm in work mode, and I know not everybody has that luxury and they have to be more on the ball, but if Joe needs me, he'll call me. I know that.

Joe Rando (17:30):

In fact, I'll never email you.

Carly Ries (17:32):

True.

Andrew Mellon (17:33):

Well, we stopped using email for internal communications in my company. It took a little while to break the people on the team of, do not send me an email. Put it on Slack, we use Slack. Text me, call me, Slack me. Do not send me an email. You can cc me. So again, it'll go into a folder if I need to see what did you send somebody? I can go look at it, but otherwise it's not landing in my inbox. It doesn't need to. It was your correspondence. I'm just the CC or the BCC, so I'm not involved in the thread necessarily in a primary way. I'll see it when I need to see it or I'll never see it. And who caress,

Joe Rando (18:20):

Does Slack interrupt you too much? People just go, "got a question" instead of saving it up. You know what I'm saying?

Andrew Mellon (18:28):

Yeah. I mean there are definitely opportunities to train anybody that you're collaborating with to batch questions instead of pinging you with each individual question. Because then all of that kind of asynchronous communication, whether text message, slack, email, is all about, again, those expectations and always an opportunity to look at how well or how poorly we communicate with each other. Half the time we're in our head, we're thinking in staccato or abbreviated sentences. We have the full context. We're asking somebody, "Hey, where's the so-and-so"? I don't even know what you're asking me. I don't know the context for how urgent this is, but in your head as the questioner, you understand exactly what's motivating you to do it. I've had to train my team to use full sentences, nothing shorthand, nothing abbreviated. I'm not paying you by the word. So use them all and articulate exactly what you need from me, why you need it from me, when you need it from me, and then I will get it back to you as it fits into my schedule, not the other way around.

(19:50):

As a manager, my job is to be responsive to my team and support them in doing their work, which is supporting me. At the same time, if I don't get back to you in 30 seconds, I'm sure there's something else on your list to do that you shouldn't have to stop. All work doesn't cease because I haven't gotten back to you. Going back to your point, Joe, about Slack, I have notifications turned off. Like Carly checks her email, that's how I check Slack. I'll log onto Slack and see if there's anything that needs my attention, and if not, I can just put it away.

Carly Ries (20:26):

Smart. Andrew, I would love to see what your internal documents within your team look like. I feel like movie critics always say they can't just go watch a movie and enjoy it. It's their job. They have to critique everything. Do you just turn everything into a process in your head when you're walking down the street? "Oh, I know how to make that a process. Oh, I know how to streamline that." Can you escape it?

Andrew Mellon (20:50):

Yeah, fortunately I think I have good mental health and I don't suffer from OCD. I can walk by a clutter mess and not have to organize it. It's your clutter. I can witness it and not need to jump in. And I do like solving puzzles. So when there is an opportunity for efficiency and productivity and being able to hack something and tweak it and make it remove friction, that's a fun puzzle for me to solve. I'm always looking for it on the inside of the business. Out in the world, I recognize whether it's putting money in a parking meter or checking out in a store, sometimes when you run into friction, I do think this could be better. That's as far as I go. I do identify there's a problem here. I'm not so vested in, and I will solve it as much as just like, this is a problem, make a mental note. Maybe don't come back to this store at this time next time. That's probably as far as I'll problem solve because I'm as the next person. I want to protect my own time. So, they didn't hire me to fix their problem, but as it impacts me, maybe this isn't the post office that I'll return to. I'll go to the other post office, even though it's a half a mile further away, they seem to get stuff done a little quicker.

Carly Ries (22:32):

Fair. Speaking of solving problems, we all use tools these days to solve our problems. We've talked about Slack, we've talked about QuickBooks on this call. Do you have any apps that you recommend people use to streamline, to save their time, that won't necessarily break the bank?

Andrew Mellon (22:51):

I'm pretty low tech in some ways. It starts to become clutter and busyness. I love the Google suite of products, certainly for collaboration, real-time collaboration. It's genius that instead of having to work in Microsoft Word and mail you a Word document and then have you mail me back a Word document, we can both log onto Google Drive, either synchronously or asynchronously, edit a document in real time. It's unheard of in the same way as video conferencing. This was the Jetsons when we were growing up. How is this possible that we can do this as effortlessly and frictionlessly as we can. Also, I don't want busyness. An app, just like everything else in the marketplace, they sell them with the promise that this will make your life more comfortable, convenient, or beautiful. It's an easy test to run your experience against their promise and see, does this actually solve a problem or does it create another problem for me that I didn't have before I started to use this?

(24:01):

We have to be able to both live in alignment with our values and trust our own judgment. We all have life experience that we can reference. And regardless of where you're at on any sort of life arc, you've had successes, you've had failures by the time you're listening to this interview. You know what you have done really well, you know what you've done that sucked and what was sort of in the middle. Being able to reference your own experience of this doesn't make it easier for me. Just like we were talking about with the email. This doesn't make it easier for me. Great. Then don't do it. Find something else. Few things are all or nothing and are going to solve everybody's problem. You don't need to rely on an external authority to tell you this will save time for you if it doesn't actually save time for you.

(25:06):

There's the learning curve of learning how to use anything. You're not going to be an expert at anything the first time you pick it up, but you can also sense, this is not how I connect the dots. This is not going to be useful for me regardless of what the promise is on the other side of it. Or, oh, even as I'm learning this, I can see its utility and this actually is going to make things better and easier for me. I just have to get over the learning curve and then I'll be in that sweet spot where this will actually cumulatively save me more and more time the more I do it and the more I use it. Often in my experience that is often about systems and SOPs more than a particular app or piece of software, it's because so much of it is about how we move through time and space more than what are we moving through time and space with. A car will always get you there faster than a bicycle, unless you're on a bike trail, in which case the car is going to go off the bike trail and the bike is actually a more efficient thing.

(26:14):

But they're both modes of transportation. It's not expecting the outside thing to cure an inside problem. The inside problem is I tell myself garbage stories about how much time I have or how long something will take based on the garbage conversation I'm having with myself. I make choices and then that either shoots me in the foot or opens up a big bunch of time that I'm surprised to discover where I can do something that I really love to do. It ultimately all comes back to you and how you're connecting those dots.

Joe Rando (26:50):

I love that. One of my favorite books was Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and he talks about getting more efficient, but if you have the wrong paradigm... you talk about bloodletting as a medical treatment back in the day, and he's like, you can get more and more efficient at it, but it's not going to really help. You have new technologies around bloodletting but once you get the actual correct paradigm, things go a lot smoother. And what you're saying is that you can throw all the technology you want and a bad system and a bad approach to your work, and maybe it'll help a little bit, but it's nothing like having a standard operating procedure that you can put in place and execute against reliably. That makes total sense.

Andrew Mellon (27:34):

The answer is not necessarily going to rescue you from poor choices.

Carly Ries (27:39):

Speaking of those choices, solopreneurs' personal life, professional life, sometimes they're intertwined, they have so much going on. If you had three things you think that solopreneurs should focus on to save that hour to get more organized, where should they start?

Andrew Mellon (27:58):

I would say that "know what your core values are so that when you have to make a decision, it's not based on your feelings in the moment. It's not based on anything other than what is important to me." As you shared earlier, Joe, that idea of "it's my time". You need to rearrange your expectations. I'm not going to answer your email instantly just because you sent it to me instantly. That's because you know what's important to you. We often say, "oh, I know what is important to me. My family's the most important thing to me." If you have ever stopped in your driveway to answer one more email before leaving for your kid's soccer game, in that moment, your kid's soccer game was not the most important thing to you. Now, you can try to mitigate that and massage it. It's all bologna.

(29:00):

Ultimately when your kid's sitting on a therapy sofa saying, "yeah, my parents said, oh, I'm the most important thing in their life and never made it to a single soccer match or swim meet on time." That's their experience. So you can say whatever you want to say, their experience was their experience. Knowing what's important to you and being able to establish boundaries and be clear about this matters. this doesn't matter. Always being able to return to that. Again, they're neutral. Once you're clear about them, it becomes much easier to make decisions. I say often, "winners do what they have to do. Everyone else does what they want to do." If it is important for you to succeed at what you're doing, then you're going to suck it up. You're going to eat the frog however you want to frame it for yourself, but you're going to do the thing whether you want to do it or not, because you want the result of having done it.

(30:00):

Les Brown said something about, and I'm paraphrasing this, but I'm sure it can be Googled, that thing about people will or won't have tomorrow, what they're willing to do or not do today. So many people are in their head about "I want this to happen". It's a bizarre kind of magical thinking that just because you want it to happen, it's going to happen without any sort of action. You have to do the behavior. You have to take action. No amount of talking about anything, other than if it's talk therapy, that's not going to move the needle an inch. You can unpack ideas, but you always have to put them into action to make something happen. Go back to your core values become decisive. Clutter is nothing more than deferred decisions so every time you don't make a decision in real time, you're just wasting time. Which is different than I've decided I want to lay in the hammock and read a book. That's a completely legitimate choice. Don't do it because you're freaked out about the other two decisions you have to make. It isn't a place to hide out or at least tell the truth. I'm overwhelmed. The best I can do is not make a mess today. I'm going to check out. I'm taking a mental health day. If I put my thumb on anything, it's going to mess it up so better to just excuse myself. I'll hit it tomorrow twice as hard. If you know that you can do that. Again, if that's one of your 200 lies and you often let yourself off the hook, it's helpful to know that about yourself. Like, oh, that's a load of crap. Tomorrow's not going to be any different than today. It's just going to be tomorrow.

Joe Rando (31:50):

Can you repeat that? Clutter..

Andrew Mellon (31:54):

Clutter is nothing more than deferred decisions.

Joe Rando (31:58):

That's awesome.

Andrew Mellon (31:59):

It is so funny. You just set something down, you came back. I mean, you told one of your 200 lies, right? I will definitely deal with this tomorrow later, anytime other than now, you set it down, you kept walking, and then you probably set something else on top of it and said, these two things live together. This is my time management hack. I'm going to make a little pile or a little stack of all the things that belong together, and then when I have some free time, "never", I will address these things. And that's how piles and stacks happen.

Joe Rando (32:31):

I'm looking at my desk!

Carly Ries (32:33):

Joe, It's funny that that's the line you focused on. That was the one that stuck with me too. I was like, gosh, I wonder if this guy has recently written a book. So Andrew, can you please tell us about your new book?

Andrew Mellon (32:48):

Sure. My new book is Calling Bullshit on Busy, and we address the eight Deadly Time Thieves, overcommitting, poor planning, multitasking, emails, meeting, social media, procrastination and interruptions.

Carly Ries (33:05):

How do you remember those off the top of your head?

Andrew Mellon (33:08):

I did write the book, so I spent a lot of time with those eight deadlies. And I am out on the speaking circuit talking about them. I will tell you that when I first came up with them, I would have to count them and which one am I forgetting? Which one am I missing? But at this point, I can make it through all eight of them.

Carly Ries (33:28):

It's like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. List it off. Well, we love recommending books to our community, so I'm excited to dive into that one. Andrew, this is a question we ask all of our guests before they hop off. You help people be successful with productivity, organization, all that jazz. So we have to know what is your favorite quote about success?

Andrew Mellon (33:50):

I don't know if it's about success, but something that I rely on all the time is "inside every disappointment is the seed of an equal or greater opportunity." A mentor taught me that years ago. The first time he said it to me, I wanted to punch him in the head. I was like, I am not seeing the opportunity in what is in front of me right now. And every time it has proven to be true, even if I can't see it in the moment. Inside every disappointment is the seed of an equal or greater opportunity. That's all about mindset. Glass half empty, glass half full. When I can get my mindset back to there is an opportunity here for me if I'm willing to see it, instead of holding onto the disappointment, the frustration, the expectation that I didn't get what I wanted or I got something I didn't want. If I can set that aside and really focus in, I will see the opportunity here for either the growth of my business, my own personal development and happiness, without exception, that has proven to be true for me.

Carly Ries (34:55):

Love it. Well, Andrew, as we wrap up, where can people find more about you? Where can they buy your book? Tell us everything.

Andrew Mellon (35:04):

Sure. Andrew Mellon.com is the place to start looking for things. I've got a robust YouTube channel. I'm on all the social media channels so you can find me out and about in the world that way, so long as you spell my last name right. All three of my books are available at Amazon. One of them is a Kindle Single, the middle book, The Most Organized Man in America's Guide to Moving, KDP published it so you'll only find that at Amazon right now.

(35:46):

The other two books, Unstuff Your Life is Everywhere books are sold and there's all three flavors. There's an ebook, there's a print book, and there's an audio book of both Unstuff Your Life, Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Change Your Life for Good, and then Calling Bullshit On Busy. They're available all the places that you can get books. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any of your local independent bookstores, they're in all the places.

Carly Ries (36:16):

Love it. We have had such a great time talking to you today. My family and I have been out of our house for eight months because of renovations and just moved in, and now I'm like, oh, well, I have the motivation I need to go organize everything and prioritize what I need to. So thank you selfishly for this interview. I'm sure our listeners have gotten so much out of it as well. We really appreciate your time today.

Andrew Mellon (36:41):

It's my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Carly Ries (36:44):

Awesome. Listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. As you know, we'll see you next week on the next episode of the One-Person Business. See you soon.

Speaker 5 (36:56):

You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At Lifestarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.