Aligning Your Time and Your Priorities - with Amy Tokos, CPO

Episode 22: Aligning Your Time and Your Priorities - with Amy Tokos

Time is one of those resources that you can’t get back once you use it. Helping our clients with productivity is great, but what about our own productivity? Running a business can feel like running in circles sometimes.

On our 22nd episode of Stand Out: Growing Your Organizing and Productivity Business, host Sarah Karakaian talks with guest Amy Tokos, CPO. Amy has a background in Lean Engineering, which she has translated very nicely into helping people lead what she calls “lean living” – which is not a diet plan! It does take into account the preciousness of time in all that we do.

Amy Tokos is the owner of Freshly Organized and has been a NAPO member since 2008. Her mission is to help others make their lives more streamlined and organized. Amy’s background is in engineering. Her work focused on making manufacturing processes simpler and more efficient, also known as lean manufacturing.

Her lean thinking maximizes time and space. Because of this background and her passion for time management, Amy helps clients be more strategic instead of reactive. She believes in time blocking. She’s also a fan of focus, not multitasking.

What You Will Learn in this Episode:

Aligning your work with your values, lifestyle, and priorities
Strategic decision-making around time management
The wide variety of resources available to better understand productivity
The value of family meetings
Understanding your monetary value as an expert, and billing accordingly.
Time blocking dos and don’ts – and permission to make exceptions
The power of connecting with influencers as word-of-mouth endorsement of your work
Learning to say “yes” or “no” based on your priorities and the money or time ROI
How to monitor the time you spend on technology

The Golden Nuggets:

“Time is very sacred.” – Amy Tokos Share on X “When an organizer places something at point-of-use to save people time from walking all over the house, that's productivity. You are saving people time.” – Amy Tokos Share on X “I decided not to go back to the corporate world. My family had developed a pleasant lifestyle. Building my own business was about taking charge of my time as much as helping others with their own productivity.” – Amy Tokos Share on X “People may come to you asking for help organizing their ‘stuff,’ but they wind up talking about calendars and time management and communication. If you are helping in those areas, you are a productivity professional.” – Amy Tokos Share on X “Family meetings are great. They get everyone thinking forward instead of just in the moment.” – Amy Tokos Share on X “I would say if you're sacrificing your core priorities to do something, then the answer needs to be ‘no!’” – Amy Tokos Share on X “You’re not going to be remembered for your web site or that great tweet you just sent out. It's the people that you're touching. That's how you're going to be remembered, so you need to make time available for that.” – Amy Tokos Share on X