Get to Zero: How to Get Organized
and Stay There for Good

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #520: Get to Zero: How to Get Organized and Stay There for Good

Jeff Sanders
Every morning, I have one goal before I start my day.

Get to zero.

What does that mean?

Lots of things.

Let's discuss.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 520.

Get to zero.

How to get organized and stay there for good.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down what it means to get to zero, how to apply the zero concept to your email, home, office, projects, and more, and how getting to zero can be your ticket to getting and staying organized for good.

Let's get to it.

Can you thrive with 10,000 or more unread emails in your inbox?

Can you achieve your biggest goals when you have piles of paperwork strewn about your home and office?

And finally, can you become your best self when you're nearly drowning in noise every day?

I'm going to guess no.

No, you probably can't or really don't want to try.

Thriving in these scenarios is going to be tough.

However, there is a way to reduce the clutter, make progress on your goals, get organized, and stay organized going forward.

Of all the things that caused me to create this podcast years ago, more than a decade ago now, it stemmed from not just my, let's call it personal skill set when it comes to being productive or enthusiastic or just mission oriented towards making great content on this show.

No, no, no, no.

Where this came from was a day job, a day job where I was forced to do something I had never done before, which was take the chaos I just described, tons of emails, piles of paperwork, noise every day, and streamline that into a process to make things easy.

So let's go back years ago.

I was working at a college here in Nashville and I was moved into a new position, which is the registrar of the school.

If you know that position in education, you know the registrar is in charge of essentially all the details.

They run the school in the sense of all of the details, all of the paperwork, all of the files, all of the data that's associated with the educational institution.

Registrars do a lot.

They are busy people.

What's asked of them is to essentially organize a lot of data and effectively execute on a variety of tasks in a variety of ways.

So I went from someone who has a background in theater in my college days and who wanted to do something with performance, which landed me here as a podcaster, public speaker, combo pack.

And from that, I was thinking to myself, how do I move myself forward in my endeavors?

Well, I needed a day job to pay the bills while I was building my side business, which is now what I do full time.

Long story short, I had this day job back in my mid twenties and I was now in charge of this college in the sense of details, paperwork, organization, effectively executing these difficult tasks.

I say difficult because when I walked into the job, you could make an argument that I didn't have the skill set to do the job.

I had no experience in it.

I was not someone who was known at the time for being productive.

Yes, I did well in school, but I almost to that would say, so what?

How does that translate to me doing well in this position?

And the answer was, well, let's go find out.

Let's go try and see what can happen.

And so I found myself initially absolutely overwhelmed.

I talk about piles of paperwork because back in my mid twenties, this is now what?

Almost 15 years ago, uh, piles of paperwork were the norm.

The digital world was not the default, at least not yet at this college.

Yes, we had digital systems, but we also had a ton of file cabinets that I was personally in charge of.

And so I had actual piles on my desk and at the way that I was kind of situated in the school was that I had a pretty large office with big desks and a lot of access to resources, which was great.

I needed it.

And what I ended up doing was creating these stacks of papers all over the place that I then over time organized into a very effective system to know what was important and what was not what to work on and what to ignore.

And so this job forced me to be productive, to learn the skillset of productivity, to absolutely amplify what I was doing well, sort of, but then do it at a super high level.

So I was working 40 hours a week, fully on all 40.

I mean, I was caffeinated, sure, but I was focused.

I was hyper dialed in on doing really well at this job in large part because it required it, but also in part because I loved it.

I discovered my love for being productive, being efficient, finding new ways to organize and strategize and build systems and create a whole new world in my job so that I could be a high achiever for what that job was asking of me.

And it worked.

It went really, really well after a long period of time of testing and reorganizing and redoing.

I got really good at this.

And this is right about the time that I began to blog about it, to talk about it on the website that I had at the time.

And then yes, eventually podcast about it, which is why this show exists in many ways because of that particular job and the challenge that it posed for me.

And so this concept of getting to zero plays at hand here beautifully because that's what I was striving for every day.

Now I'll describe what getting to zero means in just a second, but I have one more example that I want to break down.

And this is one you can probably relate to in a very clear way.

I gave the example earlier of having more than 10,000 unread emails in your inbox.

That's not a random number that I pulled out of nowhere.

I was speaking at a conference years ago talking about this concept of getting to zero.

And I was discussing inbox zero and making sure you had no emails and you processed all of them and got yourself to a great place there.

And after the talk, a woman in the audience came and showed me her phone and on the mail icon on her iPhone, it had a number that was higher than 10,000 for the unread messages.

I almost had a heart attack.

I don't know what to do with that.

It was, it blew my mind.

It was just what he, what, how, how I don't know how to respond to that.

That's not how I operate, not how I live.

That's not something that I can relate to.

But I can because we all have those places in our lives where there's just a pile of junk somewhere.

It could be digital, it could be physical, it could be emotional.

There's always some sort of just unprocessed pile of stuff.

And sometimes it's okay.

Sometimes that pile of stuff can be ignored and there's no real consequence, but sometimes there is.

And when there can be an intense consequence because you've ignored something, well, now it needs your attention.

Now all of a sudden getting to zero means something because getting to zero in this case means you're going to process that information.

You're going to work through that pile of noise.

You're going to read those emails, at least some of them.

We're going to work through a process to get you to a place where you have that sense of I got there.

I got to inbox zero.

I got to a place where I'm caught up.

I got to a place where I'm not stressed out by my work and by the noise and by the regret of not having done the work in the past, the regret of postponing yet again that thing you know in the back of your mind you should be giving attention to.

That's what getting to zero gives you the chance to achieve, is the chance to get to that point where that huge stress on your shoulders is gone and you feel fantastic and free and open because the thing that needed to get done got done and all that pile of stuff is no longer a pile of stuff.

It's not even there at all.

It's cleared out.

In fact, from that example, if you go back to my job as the school's registrar, those piles of paperwork that I had in the beginning got smaller and smaller and smaller and by the time you saw me near the end of this time that I have at this position, there weren't piles of paper.

They were gone.

Now in part because I digitized a number of things, but on the other hand, I had found ways to not have endless piles of paper.

I had built new systems that did not involve that visual sense of stress, which is what comes from that.

You look at a huge pile and I instantly feel like, "Oh, I got to do something about that.

Man."

Because that's how I operate.

I see a mess and I just instantly want to clean it up.

Now, in some areas of my life, there are others where I am the classic example of a guy who has, for example, in my life, my garage is a pile of stuff.

If you know me and how organized I am in certain areas of my life and you saw my garage right now as it stands, you'd be like, "Jeff, come on, man.

That's not you.

You can do better than this."

I know I can and I will.

I got to get there.

But we all have that place in our life.

We all have somewhere we can point to, whether visually or otherwise, where it's just, "Here's my challenge.

Let's get to it."

So, let's break down the getting to zero concept with a little more clarity.

The goal behind this is to allow you to get to a place where you can have that level of confidence where you walk into your day and you say, "Today is going to be great."

I actually mean it.

I'm not just saying today is a great day arbitrarily.

I'm saying that from the productivity sense of, "I'm going to nail this stuff today.

I'm going to get it done and I have every confidence that I can because it was set up well because I did the work already to allow that to be true."

Now, for us to get to that point, for you to be at that point where you feel that level of confidence, we've got to get you to zero.

So here's what that means.

Yes, it could mean zero emails in your inbox, zero texts to reply to on your phone, zero tasks on your to-do list that are due right now, zero clutter in your home or office or other spaces where you exist, could be in your car as well.

You also have clarity on what to do next, your next actions, confidence in your schedule and your ability to execute on the tasks you have on your schedule.

And then ultimately, I kind of view this as a way to get to a more purposeful way to work because purpose can really show up when that stress has been removed.

It's hard to feel a sense of purpose other than clean the mess up if the mess is all you see, which is another way of saying we're not going to be firefighters here.

We're not just trying to put out the next emergency.

We don't want to live in a world where everything is always chaotic because if that's where you are or where you've been for a long time or where you see yourself going in the near future, it's exhausting.

Overwhelm is going to show up, burnout is going to show up if it's not already there to begin with.

Getting to zero helps to solve this.

It directly addresses this.

So for me, when I think about getting to zero, I literally practically think how do I take these areas of my life down to that baseline perspective.

So in your inbox for your email is a good example, the mailbox for your physical mail, your desktop where you actually work both physically and the digital desktop on your computer.

All of these are places where you can process what's there and put it where it belongs.

That's the underlying foundational principle here is that the things that are there, the things to be processed belong somewhere else.

They don't belong where they are because where they are is in your way.

Where they are is a distraction.

They go somewhere else, which could be in the trash, could be recycled, could be donated, could be processed, filed away and organized more intelligently.

But the real underlying concept here is that everything you see that seems out of place is.

It is out of place.

It's clutter because the thing is somewhere it's not supposed to be.

And all of a sudden when it is where it's supposed to be, that clutter is gone.

The physical item is still there.

It still exists, but it exists somewhere else.

And so what we're talking about here is just movements, like puzzle pieces.

Things go somewhere else.

They're processed in the way that they are relocated.

And that process of relocating things, it frees up your stress.

It opens you up to do more and better work.

That's what getting to zero means.

It's zero in specific places you have predefined and the things you have moved to allow that zero to exist are now where they belong.

And then you feel a lot better.

I hope that makes sense.

We're gonna get into more of this in just a second.

Let's talk about now how to apply this concept of zero to your email, to your home, to your office and to your projects.

If you know my book, The 5AM Miracle, and you know this podcast from many years ago, I discussed a concept called equilibrium zero.

That's the concept I use actually in the book.

Equilibrium zero means you're going to get to what is equilibrium.

It is a homeostasis.

It is a place to restart, to rebegin your life and your work.

And I apply that concept in my book to four areas.

Inbox zero, desktop zero, home base zero, and project management zero.

We probably understand inbox zero fairly well, which is emails come into your inbox and then what happens?

We have to process that email.

So where does it go?

You could delete it.

You could mark it as spam as it goes to a junk folder, or you could file it away.

That's it, right?

We're not gonna leave it in the inbox.

It doesn't belong there.

It's a temporary holding place.

That's the key concept here.

Where things are, are temporary and there's a permanent home for them somewhere else.

And so when an email lands in your inbox, it's temporary.

And then even if you reply to that email or not, it doesn't matter.

After it's been processed, it is going to be put where it belongs, trash, junk, or filed away intelligently into a folder in your email system.

That's all this means.

It's very simple.

But of course in practicality, you can't find yourself or hopefully won't find yourself with more than 10,000 unread messages at some point.

I have friends, I'm not gonna name them, but they know who they are, who have recently admitted publicly that they have this same problem.

And I feel sorry for you.

I do, you know who you are.

Anyways, if you find yourself in that position where your inbox is struggling that much, you can do this.

You can process it.

Now, yes, there is a concept where people just simply delete all the emails in their inbox and walk away and start over, right?

It's like email inbox Armageddon.

There's other names for it too, but basically you just blow it up and say, forget it.

I'm not going to reply to any of these messages.

I will file them all away and ignore them and start over.

And honestly, if you've got to a point where you're at 10,000 or more emails, pretty good chance that people that have been bugging you and pinging you have moved on.

However, if you have important emails in there like bills to pay or important deals to negotiate, you may have some bigger problems to work on, which is why I think this is so important.

It's why I value this concept so much because it guarantees I don't miss things.

I don't miss important bills that come through my email.

I don't miss important conversations about contracts to negotiate or opportunities to seize.

I don't miss them because I process everything every single day at this very moment, right now recording this podcast, I'm an inbox zero.

Why?

Because I almost always am.

I don't let emails pile up.

I don't.

I've been doing this element for probably 15, almost 20 years now.

This has been my life.

It's how I live.

It's how I communicate.

It's how I achieve goals because the communication element here is the backbone of goal achievement for me in so many ways.

And I'm sure it is for you as well.

So the inbox zero component here is critical.

The next section here is desktop zero.

And I mean that both physically and digitally.

So the actual physical desktop where you work and have your office supplies, your notebooks, your pens, your staplers, that physical desktop has what I'll call an equilibrium, a homeostasis.

It doesn't mean that the desk is literally empty when you get to zero.

It means that the things that need to stay there permanently are there.

And the things that are there temporarily are only there for the project you're working on in that moment.

And then when you're done with that project in the moment, those things go back where they belong in their permanent home.

Simple example, a pen could be used to write things down, but it doesn't just lay in the desk somewhere.

A pen usually goes somewhere in a drawer, in a cup.

It belongs in a specific place where it lives.

It's its home.

We're trying to find the home for all these different items.

Of course, if things can be thrown away or recycled, those things will happen pretty automatically.

But everything else that could become clutter, that could find a permanent home in a place that shouldn't be, that's your challenge, to figure out where this thing belongs and put it there.

And then once you get there, the goal should be, at least from my perspective, to at least once a day, probably the end of the workday, to get back to zero.

The day's work has been done, the creative energy has been expressed, you did all the hard work, you're going to wrap up for the day, clock out, go home.

Okay, well now's a great time to put everything away so tomorrow we'll begin again at a clean slate at desktop zero.

Now the bigger challenge here, honestly, is not the physical desktop.

The bigger challenge is the digital one.

I know way too many people who use their actual digital desktop as a dumping ground for every file they could possibly imagine.

Yes, there's an argument to be made that it's an easy access location for the things you frequently need access to in your job.

Okay, great.

I still think the desktop is a terrible place to keep those things.

This is my take on this.

It's very subjective, but I'll tell you how I operate.

My desktop is always at zero, unless I'm actively working on a file that day in the exact same way I would do so on the physical desktop.

So once I'm done with that project, done with that file, done with that folder, it gets replaced.

It'll be deleted or it's moved to Google Drive, which is my file management system.

That's how this works.

You take something that you're actively working on, you work on it, you finish it, you edit the documents, you edit the episode of the podcast you're working on perhaps, and you move that file to the place where it needs to go.

And then tomorrow when work begins again, that desktop begins at zero because you got there before you left yesterday.

I do this basically as a lifestyle now.

I don't even think about it.

There's no thought process here.

I just, I recognize, "Oh, there's a file on the desktop.

Where does it go?

Oh, there's a thing here.

It shouldn't be here.

Get rid of it."

That's just how I operate now.

If you're not there though, if your desktop is a dumping ground for an insane number of files and folders, you have an opportunity, a grand opportunity to reorganize all the work you do and put things into a better system.

It's going to be hard.

I'm not going to lie there.

Reorganizing hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of files is a daunting task, but I cannot express how gloriously amazing it is to get to that place where it is organized.

And then you can search and find things very easily.

That's the goal you're going for.

So make that a priority this year.

If you have not already, that will change your life.

I guarantee it.

[Music] The third area here of Equilibrium Zero is the Home Base and Office Zero, which really just refers to where you live and work and the physical stuff you have around you.

So it could be like a Kleenex box, which is a good example.

I actually have that on my desk right here next to me today because during this recording, I'm experiencing insane amounts of allergies.

And so that is there temporarily.

It will be placed somewhere else.

If you have items like that, that are out for now in your home, in your office, same concept, it's here for now.

You work on it for now.

But as soon as this phase is over and this phase should be short, like an hour or two, then it goes back to where it belongs on a permanent basis.

You're just striving for that sense of clean, organized, and that knowledge of everything is where it should go.

And then you have that peace, that inner peace of knowing, my gosh, everything that I wanted to organize and put away is there.

And then if you need to find something, you know exactly where it is.

If you don't want to be distracted by something, you're not anymore because that thing has been put away, thrown away, recycled, donated, it's gone.

That's a minimalism perspective also.

If you want to use that concept, it works really well.

If you want to adapt the idea that you are a minimalist, well, then you're only going to use the few things you need and everything else is noise.

And so it's by default gone.

If you live and work that way, you'll only have a few things to work on and look at and focus on and address.

That's going to reduce your stress.

That's going to allow higher effective work.

That's going to lead to more quality, more quantity, more effectiveness, more goals achieved.

This is not just my perspective on organization.

This is how people get things done.

This is how big things happen is extraordinary level of focus without all that noise, without the distraction of physical and digital stuff.

So those areas are all fairly related.

Inbox zero, desktop zero, and then home base or office zero.

It's the same concept.

The fourth element is kind of off in its own little world, but still fits, which is project management zero.

In this perspective, we're probably not going to be putting things away in that same kind of thought process.

The way that I view project management zero is that I fully understand what has taken place, the tasks that are completed and done in the past.

I also fully understand the things that are coming up.

A very organized list of my next actions that I'll be getting to as the project moves forward, which means tomorrow morning, for example, I come into the office and I ask the question, "Hey, here's this current project I'm working on.

What's the very next thing I'm going to do?"

I know the answer to that if the project itself has been thought through in this way.

If I got to zero in the project, which doesn't mean it's finished.

It means it's finished for that day.

It means the past is the past, the future is the future, and the next action is super clear.

It's right there in front of me.

I know exactly where I am in real time.

So what I'm striving for here is an incredible sense of awareness about where this project stands, what is due next, and what my next action on it is, and potentially the next actions of those who are on the team with me.

But the idea here is clarity.

It's awareness, it's organization, it's simplicity, and especially geared towards this very simple just next action perspective.

Here's the next thing to do, and I do it, and then the next one is ready to go from there.

If you can get to that level of organization and clarity in your project, it's not going to cause stress.

Your focus just goes to the very simple next objective.

You're not going to carry the weight of the whole project on your shoulders.

Emotionally, physically, it's not going to be there because you're just going to be thinking about the next thing to do.

I say all of this because that's essentially what productivity comes down to, is the next action.

It is that confidence of I know where I am in the process.

I can see the bigger picture, and my systems support that.

So that's what we're striving for through Inbox Zero, Desktop Zero, Homebase and Office Zero, and of course, Project Management Zero, to get us to that place where we can say with confidence, "Yes, I'm here.

I'm ready.

I see what's next.

Let's get to it."

That's the concept.

Hope that works for you.

If you want more clarity on this, or to see it on paper, of course, the 5A Miracle Book is available, paperback, audio as well, and yes, on the Kindle.

Okay, let's wrap this up with a question or concept around how getting to zero can really take you to the next level.

I want you to imagine a better future for yourself and the way that you get projects accomplished.

Imagine getting to Inbox Zero every single day.

Imagine clarity on your next action on all of your current, most important projects.

Imagine a clean and organized home and office.

What do these things make possible?

Being organized for good means you only need to accomplish a few things each day to get back on track.

That's it.

Getting to Inbox Zero doesn't mean that every single day I process 10,000 emails.

It means I process 10, and that's it, and then I'm done.

You reply to the few emails you need, and then you're there.

You put away the few items that are out, and then you're there.

You do the one next task on your list, and then you're there.

It's not a lot of work.

When you get to this zero concept in all these areas, potentially all at the same time, well, what it makes possible is that immense amount of simplicity, that minimalistic perspective of I know what's next.

I'm ready.

I'm clean.

I'm organized.

Let's get to it.

Now there is one area of this that I haven't actually said out loud that I need to say with clarity because this is also a very important component to what this system requires.

What it requires is a daily commitment.

This is not a one-size-fits-all system, but even more importantly, it's not a one-time effort system.

This is a daily decision to get back to this.

If you don't commit every single day to this, then the days you don't commit add up to more work to the next time that you do.

That's how you wind up with 10,000 or more unread emails is that one day you said, "I'll get to that tomorrow," and the next day you said, "I'll do that tomorrow."

Every single day, more emails are showing up.

The pile is getting bigger every single day.

A daily decision means the amount of daily work isn't very much, but the once a month effort to reduce that pile is going to be a lot harder.

The once a year, way harder.

Once a decade or less than that, it's gone.

It's over, right?

We're not there anymore.

If you want to use this simple concept of a daily commitment to say, "Yes, I care about this.

Yes, I see the value in this.

Yes, I want this end result," well, then you got to do the work every day.

This podcast is not selling a quick fix.

It's not.

I never have.

I'm never going to because I live this stuff every day.

I know what is required.

Now, the actual effort on a daily basis is not extraordinary, but it is a recommitment every day to that level of success that I expect for myself.

If you're striving for that as well, I am asking you to take on the challenge to not just get to zero for the one-time benefit that provides, but of course, the ongoing daily success you will achieve by recommitting every morning, getting back to zero frequently.

Then because of that, this stress you may feel, it's not going to be there.

Instead, you're going to feel joy and motivation and excitement, even enthusiasm for the work itself, because the work itself is not going to be a drain on your resources.

It's going to amp you up and get you excited to go do more and do so in a better way.

As a quick review for the concepts this week, two things to focus on, getting to zero one time in all of these areas with a focus on your email inbox, your physical and digital desktop, your home, office, and projects.

We want to get to zero at least once.

And then of course, experience the glory of doing this work every day to get to zero on an ongoing basis.

That's it.

That's the concept.

That's the challenge.

If you choose to accept it, I would love to hear more about that.

You can email me, jeff@jeffsanders.com.

This is fun stuff.

Honestly, I really look forward to digging into messes like this and cleaning them up because the joy that I feel afterwards, even during the process, it's an incredible thing.

So enjoy the journey.

Enjoy the process of getting yourself to zero and tell me all about it.

And for the action step this week, get to zero for the first time.

If you're drowning in piles of work and noise, this simple concept will change your life overnight.

And the best way to tackle the problem is bit by bit, day by day.

Once you get to zero, it is so easy to stay there.

And you can then commit to getting to zero every single day.

And I promise you it will work.

If you're loving this podcast, of course, subscribe to it in your favorite podcast app you're using right now, or become a VIP member of the 5am Miracle community by getting the premium ad free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

That's all I've got for you here on the 5am Miracle Podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early.

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