INTRODUCTION
“Jab, Cross, Hook, Uppercut! Jab, Cross, Hook, Uppercut!” My trainer yelled out boxing moves. He was loud for the sake of being loud. I followed his commands as best I could with my big pink gloves. I felt like Gigi Hadid whenever I practiced with him. “Eye contact, stop yawning, put your shoulder into it, use more energy, stop yawning. . . .” I could tell he was starting to get frustrated with my lackluster performance. I didn’t mind; I was relieved to not be in charge for the first time all day. I meant to go straight to the gym from my office, but, as usual, I forgot my gym bag. Our session started at 5 p.m. and I had rolled in around 5:20. I was known as the “late client.”
My brain was still in a million pieces from the hustle and bustle of the day. The highlight reel? My team didn’t hit their sales goals, my assistant put in her two weeks’ notice, I still have several follow-up e-mails to send, I need to call my mom back, and my closest friends are in a group text message fight that is making my phone ding nonstop. If all of that wasn’t enough, I felt a case of the sniffles coming on, and the trainer was right . . . I was tired!
Boom, boom, boom . . . my glove would meet his boxing pads. I boxed in leggings and an oversized gray hoodie that probably needed to be retired years ago. They say that when you look the part, you feel the part. I certainly wasn’t feeling the part in my sad hoodie. The trainer looked at me and rolled his eyes, “Wearing your dad’s clothes again?” I smirked back at him, ignoring his comment. I tried to keep my focus, but the trainer could tell I was distracted. My mind was everywhere except at the gym.
“You need to work on this, Lauren, seriously. You seem to be all over the place. I want to see constant improvement, none of this laziness. You need to get it together!” Wow! A harsh claim from the trainer at my gym, whom I’d only met one month ago. But in all honesty . . . he was right.
Welcome to my third book. I’m so excited to take you on this personal journey and show you how I’ve been able to “get it together.” I started the writing process feeling frustrated with life and work. I was going nonstop but not seeing the results I wanted. I felt like a hot mess, like I was all over the place, and I agreed with my trainer, I needed to get it together. Today, after grueling hard work, focus, and the longing to change, I can tell you, my life is more together than I thought it would be.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS BOOK
You may know me from my other two books, All Work, No Pay and Welcome to the Real World. In those books, I wrote about the power of internships and career opportunities, and how navigating those experiences properly can help you get from where you are to where you want to be. This new title is the perfect follow-up to those books.
In Get It Together, I take my advice one step further and help you create your ultimate path to success. Like my other books, Get It Together is rooted in the workplace but provides you with actionable steps that you can utilize at home as well. As the reader, you will walk away from this book armed with techniques and tips to quickly integrate into your daily routine to make you feel more together.
We kick off the book with some solutions for success in Chapter 1. The reoccurring themes I pull out here are brought up repeatedly throughout the book. I can’t stress enough the importance of these principles as they guide the rest of the book’s material and are mantras that I try to live by.
In Chapter 2, I’ll introduce you to my daily routine (think: day in the life) and encourage you to think about reinventing your own schedule. A daily routine is our opportunity to execute and accomplish our goals, so it’s important we take that seriously. And the best part? Every day is a blank slate to start over and lock that routine into place!
Chapter 3 is about learning how to cope with failure. One clear lesson that I learned in trying to get my life together was that failure and rejection happen. And when it comes, it comes in hard. In this chapter, I help you handle these issues and find strategies to better manage both failure and rejection. Knowing how to do this will help you ultimately get it together.
Chapter 4 focuses on goal-setting, productivity, organization, and leaving work feeling satisfied. In this chapter, I discuss time and how to best track and plan how your time is spent. The exercise in this chapter (YQMB—stay tuned to find out what this stands for!) will help you to not only create goals, but learn to create Action Plans too.
Chapter 5 covers everything you need to be successful at work (all of your tools) including your calendar, inbox, bullet journal, and project management system. I go through each tool and discuss best practices based on how I stay organized at work.
Chapter 6 is all about efficiency at work and saving time while performing at a high level. In this chapter, I cover how to do great work. I’ll cover how to focus, prioritize, run efficient meetings, become more results-oriented, network internally and externally, and so much more.
Chapter 7 dives into the idea that although social networks allow us to brand ourselves and connect with more people than we ever thought possible, it also adds 100 more things to our to-do lists and is one of the biggest distractions we face. This chapter will help you evaluate which networks to use, how to use them, how to manage the noise on all your networks, and even how to really disconnect.
Chapter 8 is our professional and personal relationships chapter. Since our colleagues, supervisors, friends, and family are whom we spend the most time with, it’s important to learn the best ways to manage these relationships. Here we will define the professional and personal relationships we have and how to best handle them. I discuss strategies for dealing with conflict at work and in your personal life. As someone who is from Florida and now lives across the country in California, I share my own tips on staying connected with loved ones no matter how far apart you are.
Chapter 9 covers tips for the mind, body, and soul. I cover fitness, eating healthy, sleep, and most important—relaxation techniques. As an added bonus, I list 40 great ways that you can relax—starting today. This chapter is important because it’s not about work and only about you.
As you read these next chapters and start to create your own personal plan to get it together, #GIT, please keep me posted on your progress. I’m super accessible, and thanks to social media, we can be in touch throughout your journey.
Please feel free to message me, tweet me, DM me—anything you want. I’m @InternQueen on every social platform! I’m genuinely interested in hearing the story of how each one of you is working to get it together.
And now, without further ado, I ask you to join me in this adventure of self-improvement, professional development, business savvy, and personal wellness. Let’s get our lives together @InternQueen—#GIT!
HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
Before we dive into the first chapter, I want to tell you how this book came to be and why I’m so excited for the personal journey we’re about to take together.
When you pull back the curtain, you’ll find this book has been a work in progress for some time. In fact, the first version of this project (with a different title and take) was put together almost three years ago. Originally, I wanted to write a book about the word busy. I felt that it had crept up and invaded our lives in a way we couldn’t handle.
I couldn’t escape the busy. Every work call or personal call started with the person on the other line telling me how busy he or she was—disguising the word with silly phrases like “I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” “I’m slammed,” “I’m spent,” “I’m crazed.” I felt that “busy” was used as an excuse. People couldn’t see me, meet with me, or even talk to me because of how busy they were. I also felt that the word busy wrongfully became interchangeable with the word successful. Whoever was the busiest was also the most important. I didn’t like the busy competition. It left me feeling like I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t as busy as everyone else. Or perhaps I was just as busy but didn’t talk about it (or boast about it) in the way everyone else did. As a result, I started to subconsciously try to add random tasks and events to my calendar just to feel busy and accepted. This left me feeling overwhelmed, confused, and feeling like I’d lost myself somewhere under all of those forced plans and activities.
I was passionate about the Busy project but couldn’t seem to find an angle that made sense. Publishers pushed me to be more academic in tone, but it just felt forced—the book no longer felt like my own voice. Long story short, the concept wasn’t working and needed to be modified. I desperately wanted to provide my readers with value, not just an idea, but tangible tips that they could put into action immediately, actions that would create meaningful change. I immediately got to work with this new idea in mind and was amazed at how often I’d hear people in everyday life say some variation of “I just need to get it together!” I began to research this idea more and discovered a December 2015 Gallop poll that revealed “61 percent of working Americans said they did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do.”1 I knew I was onto something special. When I started writing about this new concept, I kept it exclusive to the workplace and how to get your work life together. But I quickly realized that my work life intersected with every other part of my life: family, friends, free time, my house, my personal fitness goals . . . everything. Getting it together wasn’t just a workplace goal, it was an everyplace goal.
In addition to feeling busy, why else did we all feel so distracted, disconnected, and “not together”? Ironically, social media (the tool that is supposed to connect us) seems to have played quite the role in creating (or at least enhancing) the chaotic world we’re all living in. And think about the pressure that we put on ourselves to uphold our Instagram-worthy lifestyles—it’s insane! We can’t live up to the impossible standards we set. We want to be the best worker, friend, parent, sibling, colleague—the list goes on and on. Not only do we want to act like we have it all together and go through the motions of having it all together, but we also want to look like we have it all together. We want to wear the cutest outfits while doing our work, seeing the world, and making things happen. Meanwhile, the more we try to be everything to everyone, the more we find ourselves constantly falling short of our own expectations and accomplishing nothing. As Erin Falconer says so candidly in her book, How to Get Sh*t Done, “nobody cares that you can do it all.”2
We can’t be perfect as perfect doesn’t exist. What we can do is reframe our thinking and strive to be better, more strategic, more prepared. The moment we focus on perfection, we immediately lose. We give ourselves anxiety, stress, migraines, gray hair, and breakouts. The American Psychological Association reports that 39 percent of millennials say their stress has increased in the last year.3 And it makes sense because we create our own stress. We spend our time diligently adding items to our to-do lists, commitments to our calendar, and heavily filtered photos to social media. Worst of all, we want to keep this stress a secret from our friends, family, and especially ourselves. We don’t want to admit that we don’t have it all under control. We desperately want everyone to think we have it all together, when it often feels like the furthest thing from the truth. We are so tangled up in our lives that we can’t see how to simplify them. And the truth? It doesn’t have to be this complicated.
I want you to be able to take your time with this book. It is filled with lifestyle changes and small tips that can really go a long way. If you rush the read, you won’t be able to push yourself and really start implementing my advice. Please, go slow, read one chapter at a time, and really consider the information I’m sharing. I know that everyone has different days, different schedules, different obstacles, different strengths and weaknesses—but I’m confident that you can find something in this book that speaks to you.
Getting it together isn’t easy. If it was, you wouldn’t have picked up this title in the first place. But I promise, we’ll fight through it together and we won’t stop until we feel better, lighter, and more in-place.
INTERVIEWS
In addition to my own advice, I wanted to get different experts to weigh in on how they manage their lives at work and at home. As soon as each interview started, it reaffirmed my interest and belief in the importance of this topic; I couldn’t believe how much we all had in common, regardless of our jobs. We were all fighting the same battle and had the same resources to achieve our goals. Each interview taught me new techniques that I could use in trying to get it together. At times, I was selfish with my interview questions, asking questions that I needed to hear the answers to. And I’m confident that you and I have things in common, and you’ll also enjoying hearing the answers to my questions.
To determine whose interviews would be the best fit for the book, I first went to our audience and asked whom they wanted to hear from. From that brainstorming session, I was able to secure interviews with business experts, social media influencers, and more!
I was lucky enough to get to interview Laura Vanderkam, one of the most popular authors on the planet when it comes to time management, for the book. She’s written several books on the subject including her latest title, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. She also happens to be one of my favorite authors as I always learn so much by reading her books. Sarah Boyd is the founder of Simply, the larger-than-life and worldwide fashion/beauty/women empowerment conference,4 and president of West Coast operations for Nylon, its new parent company. I’ve known Sarah since before she started her megabrand, and she’s always been a force to be reckoned with. Her brand receives a ton of celebrity attention from people like Olivia Culpo, Catt Sadler, and more. Another out-of-this-world entrepreneur that I spoke with for this book is MissionU cofounder Adam Braun. You may remember Braun from his previous nonprofit that he founded, Pencils of Promise. Adam is author of The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change and, of course, the brother of music superhero Scooter Braun. In his new venture, MissionU, Braun is disrupting the education space with an alternative to a traditional four-year college.
I also wanted to speak to the most organized person on the planet, and luckily, I knew exactly whom to call. Jen Robin, CEO of Life in Jeneral, a company that gets hired to go into people’s homes and work spaces to clean them up and get them organized. You’ll have to start following Jen’s Instagram feed, @LifeInJeneral, and you’ll also be inspired to get it together. And finally, you’ll hear from one of my closest friends, Rachel Doyle, the CEO and Founder of GlamourGals (glamourgals.org), a nonprofit that she’s been running for over 18 years that connects young women with the elderly through makeovers and companionship. Rachel and I run businesses of a similar size and are always leaning on each other for advice and talking about how we can both get it together!
I was so excited to also include interviews with social media influencers like Ashley Robertson (www.theteacherdiva.com) and Lauryn Hock (www.lauryncakes.com). They both have the type of Instagram feeds that others dream about! They always look put together and somehow keep up with a demanding schedule, major content pushes, constant sponsorship deals, and insane engagement from followers. I also interviewed one of my favorite YouTubers (and our network’s favorite), Brooke Miccio (@BrookeMiccio), who has a huge following on both Instagram and YouTube and somehow runs her own business, grows her personal brand, pumps out content, and is a full-time student at the University of Georgia.
• • •
We all have that person in our lives who seems to know everything about time management. For me, that person is Josh Notes, a friend and an executive efficiency and renewable energy systems expert. He provides great advice throughout the book on doing great work. When I interviewed Josh Notes, he said something that stuck with me. He asked me a trick question: “What’s the one thing that we all have in common with one another, regardless of how special or important someone might be?” I had no idea. “Time!” he declared. “We all have the exact same amount of time—168 hours in a week to do whatever we want with.” And Josh is right. We are all playing with the same tools, and when you remind yourself of that, it sort of evens the playing field.
WHAT’S NEXT?
If we actually “got our lives together,” what would we do with this newfound success? People have always told me that I have great potential, but that I always tend to get in my own way. Whether it was not completing tasks, not getting to bed on time, being messy, or ignoring priorities on my to-do list, I was sometimes my biggest issue. But if I could simply do all of those things properly, what would I discover about myself? If we weren’t constantly feeling that we are buried under messy piles of dirty clothes, dishes in the sink, empty iced coffee cups, and purses filled with scrap paper, can you imagine what we would be capable of?
I’m here to help you discover exactly that. Let’s see what your life could be like if you were able to remove the busy, the expectations of others, and just focus on what you truly want.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “OK, well, this sounds nice, but how long will it take to ‘Get It Together’?”—I totally get it. It’s a fair question.
For me, it was challenging. My eyes were bigger than my stomach. I thought I could change everything about my lifestyle all at once. I soon learned that habits are powerful behaviors to break or change. So, in order to reset my lifestyle, I first had to recognize all of the things I was doing that were holding me back.
Every night, I’d write about what was working and not working in my life, and then I’d write down what I was going to do to fix those problems I was experiencing. Today, four months later, I can tell you with great confidence that I’ve experienced change—and great change at that! I’m in tune with my own needs and therefore can make decisions that are the best for me regardless of what others think. My decisions also feel intentional and not random. On a daily basis I’m aware of what I need to do and I am able to focus and create my own “distraction free” zone, regardless of where I am. I’ve also found that I enjoy leaving my phone at home or on the other side of the room for long periods of time. These changes have not only been beneficial to me, but I’m now able to help others by sharing the tips that have worked in my life as well.
Just yesterday, a friend called and started venting about her problems, but instead of joining her pity party, I simply said, “Here’s all you need to do. Evaluate the way you spend your time at work and focus on getting more work done during the workday. I know you’re busy, but try to really focus on your projects. Don’t sit on your e-mail all day long.” (Easier said than done, I know.)
Every day I remind myself of the guiding principles in this book. They help me to recognize my own suboptimal behaviors and fully understand how to navigate difficult situations. The best thing about these principles is that we already have the tools. We internally possess the skills—we just need to remind ourselves to activate them in times of need.
So, let’s do this—let’s get it together!