Calmer Brain, Clearer Decisions: Consolidating Your Digital Chaos into One Trusted System

Imagine waking up tomorrow, opening your laptop, and knowing exactly where to find every piece of content you've ever created. Every client call, every blog draft, every podcast episode, and every random spark of genius all in one place. Imagine the mental freedom that would unlock. No more bouncing between half finished Google Docs, rogue word files, and sticky notes that you're pretty sure you left on your desktop three months ago. Just one trusted central brain for your business so you can focus on actually running it, not remembering it.

But if you're like most of the folks I work with, your digital brain is scattered everywhere. You've outgrown the systems that you piece together over time and every new tool you try just feels like another layer of noise. Instead of feeling supported, you're stuck propping up this wobbly tower of default decisions. You're reacting instead of leading. What if instead of just decluttering, you could build a single source of truth?

What I'd like to call a calmer brain. That not only holds your knowledge but helps you make clearer calmer decisions every day. Welcome to Calm is the New KPI, where we engineer calm one KPI, one bottleneck, one business at a time. And today I'm trying something new, something I'm calling a live diagnosis. In these episodes, I'll sit down with a business owner to unpack a real messy operational bottleneck in their business.

We'll look under the hood. We'll figure out what's really going on, and we'll explore tangible ways to design for more calm right there on the call. My first guest is Melissa Carson. She's a leadership and culture consultant with a ton of experience. But like so many of us, her internal systems grew organically over time and ended up scattered across tools and platforms that were dictated by who she was working with, not how she likes to work.

She's overwhelmed by duplicated efforts, too many tools, too many options to choose from, and the brain train of just trying to figure out where things live. Hey, Melissa. I'm so excited to have you here with me today.

I'm excited to be here.

For the people listening, can you give me a little bit of a rundown of the particular bottleneck that you're sort of struggling with right now? What is happening in your business?

I have a small business that's predominantly me. I have somebody who works with me on emails and getting out promotions of events type of thing. And as I've grown over the past five and a half years, I've picked and choose different tool sets to use either because of how like, I use a Mac. So in some cases, I use the notes app because I love it. I don't like the Mac applications, Safari, and all their custom things.

So I buy Office March because I grew up in corporate using Microsoft products. So I love I understand them better. But with this assistant, we use Google so that we can easily share the documents. And then over time, I picked up Airtable, and I I use Funnel Breezy for my CRM slash email marketing. I also write a lot of content, and I write it in Word.

And then it gets into either I have a blog location for a website, Marlyssa Ryder Carson, where everything long term lives, but I also send that newsletter out via Squarespace. So it gets posted in two different places. And this assistant also helps in it. So that gets in a Google doc. So I have a word document that has all the content in it.

Plus I have a Google doc that has things. I've been using the notes, but I over the weekend, I just migrated back to potentially using OneNote for capturing some of the things. But I feel like I have too many tools and I'm not sure that I really need what I thought I needed them for. Like, I think I can probably get rid of Airtable and use it for what I wanted it to do in a different way. So it's just a lot of different things that I feel like are redundant and and at least time small time sucks.

And with the emergence of AI of, like, wanting to have things in one place so that I get the benefit of being able to have all the content in one place.

Yeah. I was actually talking about this with another creator of basically the idea of creating essentially a personal data warehouse. Mhmm. So if you're familiar with kind of data structures or really any like software system, the back end of that is just a whole bunch of storage of data in different ways so that you can access it. And one of the cool things that's happening with AI right now is they are starting to build connectors to things.

And the idea behind being able to connect to a lot of different systems is if you could pick one place and store all of your content or all of your data in one place, that gives you a single essentially a single source of truth, particularly when it comes to things like content. One place to go be able to search and find all of your different newsletters or filter them by topics or also pull, have I done this newsletter as a blog? Or where have I been interviewed about this specific topic on a podcast? And being able to pull all that information together, which I think works really well on the content side. And when we're talking about systems in business on the business operations side, it's kind of a similar concept where if we can pick one place, one tool, it honestly doesn't matter what the tool is as long as it works for you and you have one place to go.

So where I see it happening a lot is the very exact situation that you're talking about where maybe you're a Microsoft collaborating with is a Google person. And now everybody wants to operate in their preferred system, but that requires creating multiple copies. And then you never quite know which version is supposed to be the, like, the real version. My question to you is the consultant that you work with is a Google first person. You are a Microsoft person because you have existed in the Microsoft world.

When you are interacting with your clients, where are they living?

I have one that is a Google Google client, but I'm working in their system. And then the rest that I worked with from a coaching or strategy stuff, they're a mix of Google and Microsoft in general. But it more shows up in how I run my business versus how to interact with them. And I think the other piece that goes through my head is as you talk to more and more people, they'll be like, oh, I love this tool. I love Notion.

It does all this thing. They're like, it is hard to get to used to, or this is like and so you're like, okay. Do I go all in? Do I switch types of things? I think I read something yesterday about some like a data warehouse similar to what you were talking about, somebody who is creating all of that.

I want it to feel easy because my business is not huge. Like, it should not be a huge burden because it's like, it's me and a handful of clients clients at any point in time.

So which piece of this feels like it takes the most time or is the most annoying for you?

I don't know if it's the most time, but I think it's where I feel like I gotta figure out the strategy because I feel like there's too much duplication. So in my newsletter process, which comes out every week, we now write it in a Google Doc so that the assistant can see it. She then posts it to Squarespace so that it lives on the blog long term. I put it into Substack so that it goes out with the newsletter. Then she slash her team capture that as well as all my daily posts in Airtable so that we have a record of here's what I did, here's where it went, here's the visual that went with it.

That's where it feels like it's overlapped to keep the the blog page of just all my writing of, like, the long form. I would call it couple paragraph long form content that I've essentially written is there and on a page I own forever versus, you know, everybody else's platform. So it's like, those are where I feel like there's duplication of effort and maybe not for the value. I started with the Airtable concept because I'd seen somebody do it around, like so I can keep the picture. I can I know what I did, and I can search to see if I want to reuse it?

The reality is because I wrote all of those daily posts in a Word document, and I have an Excel spreadsheet that outlines what post I did for the last five years, I can easily go back and say, oh, this was May of twenty twenty three, pull up the Word document and do it. So I don't really need the Airtable option, I don't think.

I think in this particular instance, you could go either way.

Okay.

In essence, you have two duplicate systems in the same way that we're talking about, you know, Word draft and a Google Doc draft. If you consolidated into it all happens in Google Docs, then you've solved the versioning issue. But in the same way, you're duplicating essentially what we're talking about where you have a data warehouse. So you have the beginnings of a personal data warehouse, but you actually have two of them. And again, it doesn't actually matter which one you go with.

But the goal is pick one and go all in. One of the benefits here of going with something like Airtable and making that your system of record is there's a lot of functionality that could be used there. For example, you are not substantially changing the draft between what goes on the blog and what goes in Substack, and instead of posting it in either place, you put it in Airtable, you can use tools like Zapier or depending on what you're doing, Airtable automations to actually post it to Squarespace or post it to Substack so that you can eliminate those functionalities. So if you collapse your Excel spreadsheet into the Airtable database, you have one single source of truth with all of your Word documents. If they're actual Word documents, you can even upload them as attachments or turn them into a PDF or whatever.

But you do have the ability to then automate some of the manual workload. And that is the benefit of using something like Airtable versus Excel. Airtable is sort of almost still the gold standard of, like, really solid automation possibilities.

And I'm not leveraging it because I think the And person you are not leveraging it. Working with now isn't an Airtable person. The person that I was working with originally wasn't initially, but was learning and was but this other is that's not their key thing. So I don't think they're ever going to really focus on that.

And a lot of these, you know, the automations that you set up, it's mostly a one time setup. Every once in while you have to do a little bit of maintenance. Okay. Setting up the automations can go both ways here. So if you do substantially change, you know, the newsletter draft versus the blog draft, and they're actually two separate things, You can do automations the other way.

So basically when something posts to Squarespace, drop all the different pieces into Airtable. So Airtable is still the system of record. But now you have maybe a table for your blog and a table for your newsletter. Both of them are automatically getting put into your data warehouse to be able to then access search, all of those things. And then eventually, the capability is that that personal data warehouse could then connect to something like ChatGPT via their new integrations thing that they just released.

But then you could essentially use ChatGPT to chat with all of your own content, all of your own data. So starting the structure to be able to take advantage of that has a lot of benefits, not just in, know, day to day automation. You can really expand this, you know, if you are somebody who's a keynote speaker, you can have your speaking information as part of the personal data warehouse, you know, all of the speaking engagements you've done each piece of your intellectual property. So if you have, you know, custom frameworks, or stuff like that, you can add that information into this data warehouse. So it can serve as a single source of truth from your content and IP perspective.

And you are building the groundwork to be able to eventually take advantage of things like integration to ChatGPT where you can then chat with yourself essentially.

Yeah. Oh, I like that.

So what other areas is this showing up for you in? Is it mostly on the content side? Or when you are thinking about planning work or doing like, where does that happen?

I think that it all is also a level of complexity. So I if I think about, like, my client notes, I was using the notes app because it was easy to use on my phone. If I were taking notes, it was easy to use on my laptop. But I feel like it doesn't have as good search fund functionality and usability as something like OneNote, which I could share with other people probably a little bit more easily than the Apple Notes app. So I think I wanna move more fully to OneNote, but I think back to systems and processes.

I do contracts through Funnel BiggerZ, which is my CRM and email marketing type tool. So they get done through there, and most of the invoicing gets done through there. I don't onboard that many clients that I have a great system yet. It would generally be some sort of set of Word documents, but could live potentially in Airtable.

There are lots of places that it could live. Are you sharing this information with clients, or is it mostly internal notes? Mostly mine. So you remember like

Yeah.

Hey. Wait.

Correct. That more.

There's a few different options that you could go about solving it. One, you could build your client calls into part of your data warehouse. So if you record client calls, you can have them automatically transcribed, added to your data warehouse, which if you are writing or talking about the work that you're doing, sometimes you have really great ideas and client calls that you forget. Right. You said You're talking.

You're being brilliant. The client is loving it. But you forget to, like, show that to the outside world so that they can have a really good understanding of what you actually do. One potential part of this could be recording the calls either using an AI notetaker or just transcribe them afterwards, stick the transcripts in your data warehouse to then be able to search and refer to. If that's the route that you go, you could also then link them to their record in your CRM, Right?

So you could tag them to the specific client and be able to integrate those things. That's even easier if everything lives in this case in air table.

And it's funny that I did start my CRM initially in air table.

In air table.

And somebody had taught me, like, it had some auto feeds to my calendar, so it showed up on my Microsoft calendar. So I'm like, who I need to talk to and, like, I've missed that because this other system isn't as sophisticated in that space right now.

Yeah. So when it comes to, like, just generally thinking about how do I pick a system to do a thing, I tend to lean very heavily into systems that are highly customizable. So something like Airtable, something like Notion, something like ClickUp, SmartSuite, stuff where you can build your own version of whatever that workflow is, but that also have the capability to become the single source of truth for everything. They can be your data warehouse. They can be your document repository.

They can be your personal data warehouse of content. And so I look for systems that have a lot of inherent flexibility so that you can build a CRM and a content warehouse and a client record. And I look for things that have good connectors. So it is, I think unrealistic to expect one tool to do absolutely everything we need it to do in business. Right?

Because content is inherently a different business than doing client operations. There's different workflows. But if you are picking a system that has inherent flexibility and has connectors to good tools. So in this case, a connector to Substack or a connector to Squarespace, the places where the other that you can't get rid of having a website, at least not yet. You can't get rid of client operations.

You probably can't get rid of email marketing. But can we connect our single source of truth to those things? And by looking and evaluating systems in a pick something that's inherently flexible and scalable and customizable and has good connectors, you can get really close to not having very many systems in your business. You just have to be really committed to, I'm not gonna build a separate system. I'm gonna build this in my one system.

So for a lot of people it starts at, I'm going to build a data warehouse for my content. Cool. Now that's there. Now let me think about client projects and how that should be built in here and CRM and how that should be built in here. And you can begin to kind of expand your system to meet your specific needs without having to like Frankenstein on a whole bunch of other systems to do the thing that you need it to do.

And part of the reason that happens is because oftentimes we'll pick the system initially that just doesn't have the capability to customize or expand to fit our needs. Where tools like Airtable, essentially it's just you know, a relational database. We can do whatever we want with it. That gives it a lot of inherent functionality and ability to scale with you as you grow. What questions do you have about all of that?

No. I mean, it's less about questions. My head starts going to, okay. So what am I gonna do about it now? Because I feel like I now have some ideas, and I'm like, okay.

This is where I I might need you more than the podcast to to think about how to map this out because I do want ease in my business. And I think that if I can eliminate either where I'm paying somebody else to do something and save that money to do something different, whether it's go to another conference or go buy some new something or other that's gonna make the business stronger. I wanna figure out how to do that and thinking about where all the linkages are across the different things that I can automate. Okay. How am I going to really pull this off?

So the first step is I would start consolidating into a single system. Okay. So if you know you have duplicate systems, start moving all the data into one place. Pick one tool that has inherent flexibility and scalability and start moving everything there. Everybody's brain and how they think about this stuff is different.

So the functionality we're talking about could be built in a variety of systems. But the first, like the easiest way is to get it all in one place. Because then even if you decide, I low key hate air table and I actually really love the notion interface and it's so much cleaner and I know that I'm gonna use it because I can make it which is not insignificant. Right? Like, we wanna build into tools that we genuinely enjoy using.

And if something about the interface makes you not ever wanna go in there, then that is not the right tool for you. There's lots of options. So finding one that like feels good to open and use is an important part of the evaluation process.

Well, it's funny that you say that because I was much I've I've never been really strong on on managing my CRM. In Airtable, I was decent. With Funnel Breezy, I am not good. I the interface is just

hate it, you hate it.

Yeah. It's just wonky. It's like I don't use it. I'm like, ugh. I need to use it.

I need to do take the notes in there. I need to put it. But I'm like, I don't love it.

I am similar. I was very early to ClickUp. So when Notion happened, I kept trying to do Notion, and my brain just doesn't work that way. It felt very cumbersome even though it's a little bit more flexible and trying to force myself into a system that didn't feel natural to how my brain thinks about things or how I want to exist meant I never used it. And then all of a sudden, I'm trying to hold things in my head, or I'm building shadow systems in Excel.

All of those things where when we really think about, like, how does this system feel to me? Is this something that I want to use and that I feel comfortable with? That's not an insignificant amount of the evaluation of which system should you use. Because the answer to which system you should you use is different is going to be different for everybody because all of our brains and our businesses look different. Regardless of which tool you ultimately end up using, starting the process of let me consolidate all the tools that are kind of the same functionality into one place means that then it's a lot easier.

One, I would almost guarantee you have duplicate records of some sort, So you can get into a single, you have single record per item basically and you can do a little bit of the data cleanup as you're consolidating the systems. But then most of the tools like air table or notion or whatever you can export that data and just move it into whatever the new system ends up being and maybe during that process you realize you love air table and you're going to stick with it and that's great. And maybe you realize like, hey, something about this doesn't quite feel right, but all of your data is there to be able to easily move into whatever the ultimate choice ends up being. So the first step of any of these projects is at least to me always start consolidating all your systems. So you're down to one.

And that part is just time consuming, right? We all have so many files and so much data. And it does take time to move it from one place to another. But one of the impacts of this is you stop having to hold in your brain where to go. So if you have an Excel spreadsheet and an Airtable and you've got maybe Asana on top of it and you've got your CRM, your brain actually has to hold where is the appropriate place for me to go to get this information.

The fewer systems you have, the less brain space you have to use on where do I go for this. Because as you consolidate down, the answer is always, I always go to Airtable, always go to ClickUp, I always go to Notion, because everything is there. And so it really can do a lot to reduce decision fatigue and free up some energetic margin. And we don't really talk about that very frequently, but knowing one where information is supposed to go. A lot of the times we have a client call showed up and what am I supposed to do with this?

And now I have a new lead and it came in an email and where is that supposed to go again? And it's too much of a pain to move it over to that system. I'll just leave it in my inbox, and I'll just snooze in, and it'll come back in a week, and I'll remember to do it. And so knowing what to do with each piece of information is also a really important aspect of that. Of I know what to do with this piece of with this lead.

I know where it's supposed to go. I know what I'm supposed to do with it. So you're not trying to hold all of these disparate balls in your hands because you're not quite sure where to put the thing to make sure that you remember to do it. And the end result is you just end up trying to hold it all.

So I guess one of my questions is, and it might just be a personal perspective, but also just the functionality of Google versus Microsoft. Some of the Google I don't love the UI of getting things done, like how I create or formatting and things like that feels awkward. But I I do like whether it's a family spreadsheet that we share. Google seems to be the way to most easily do it for all of us to be able to access it. Now maybe that I don't fully understand what I can do with some of the Microsoft stuff, but I'm just curious on your perspective of the two different tool sets.

So I come from the world of government. I was very much brought into the Microsoft ecosystem. I've built apps in Microsoft. I have existed in the Microsoft ecosystem for the majority of my non consulting career. And it is a solid product if you are in corporate and a lot of people have been indoctrinated into the Microsoft way of doing business.

So sometimes it can be really hard to envision how to do work outside Microsoft ecosystem, especially if like, that's literally all I knew. That being said, I think Google as an ecosystem is functionally better in that it's built first. And while Microsoft has collaborative features, they're not necessarily intuitive. Google is designed for people who don't know how to do any of this to be able to come in and intuitive ly do the thing that they need to do. So when I'm recommending ecosystems to clients, I'm almost always recommending Google.

But that's because most of my business is connecting Google to things. It's so much easier to connect Google to things and get Google to be an automatic function

of

what you're doing than it is to do that with Microsoft. That being said, it is very difficult sometimes for people who have been indoctrinated into the Microsoft ecosystem to get used to how Google thinks about things. Right? So in the Microsoft ecosystem, yeah, collaboration is a thing. Yeah, we're tracking changes.

But also we probably have v one, v two, v three, v 15 dot two dot three of whatever that document Where the benefit of something in Google is it's just there. It's just the one document. We've updated it. We can revert to the versions. But for the most part, it's designed to be collaborative.

And it's designed to be currently up to date, right? It's designed to be, here's the link to the file. Oh, the file is always the most recent version. If I need to see what previous versions were, I can go in the menu and look at the previous versions. But I know that there's only one copy of this thing and it is the current version.

And I think that's really powerful, but it's also really hard to get used to if you are used to v one dot b final, final, extra final.

Well, I guess the one question that I have less than that final final version is more thinking about where it lives. So if you think about Microsoft, I'm usually working on a local copy of it. Whereas, usually when I'm working on Google, I'm on a web based

browser.

Right. Is it just the the habit of saying, hey. If I really wanna be and I I think you can create local copies if you're, like, flying or doing something. I think that's the thing of, like, it's not always there. Like, I need to be feel like you need to be online to do work.

Think so it's probably a mindset shift.

It's a mindset shift. You can still use focus blocking programs or create offline versions and that sort of thing. I find the cloud based ness to be a feature, not a Because I've had situations where my computer broke. Right? And I lost everything.

Like I spilled a drink on the keyboard. That thing is mush. I'm never getting it back. I'm never preserving it. And this is also a factor of having supervised IT departments for a long time.

But I didn't actually lose anything. Everything I work on is in the cloud. So all I had to do was reinstall Google Drive and reinstall ClickUp and all of a sudden I'm right back where I was. I didn't actually lose anything. So for me, I find it to be a benefit that it's cloud based.

For me, the ability to know I'm not gonna lose anything is actually fantastic.

Yeah.

There's also the secret third option, which is actually what I do, which is most of the time I'm now using the documents inside my project management software. So Notion, everybody that's in Notion, they're not writing in Word or Google, they're writing in Notion. ClickUp has a similar feature. So I'm writing in ClickUp docs 95% of the time. It's actually rarer that I am using some other tool.

And that is almost always I'm collaborating with somebody and it's a consultant, and so I'm using the system they have. But I'm usually dropping that link to whatever it is that we're using into my project management tool, which serves as my personal data warehouse. I started going to that a few years ago because I just wanted one place. Right. Right?

I just wanted to go to one place and search for everything and the ability to do like document templates that go along with my task. Right? So when I create a new podcast episode idea, it plops down my script template and it has my entire workflow built out there. So I don't actually have to do anything. I don't have to remember where on Google Drive it is and grab the link.

I don't have to remember, okay, let me make a copy of the script template and all of those things. I could absolutely be doing that in Google or Word. But that is a sort of de facto second system, right? And again, personal preference. I know a lot of people that are, they work in Notion and they still use Google Docs or they work in Notion and they really prefer Word.

A lot of it has to do with what makes you feel like you can do your best work.

Right. Yeah. Think some of the things of Google versus Microsoft, it's more probably a learning curve of like whatever functionality. But I'm like, why is it not obvious in Google? Why is it like so I think some of it is learning And curve

just of because you know exactly where it is in Microsoft. So it feels intuitive to you. We do develop habits about how to do things. For example, like in Notion, in ClickUp when you're typing, you can use the slash command and it brings up a menu so you don't actually have to click around. But that's not true in Google Docs necessarily.

So every time I now try and type in Google Docs, I'm like, why is there no slash menu for me to put in a new heading? Right? Like, and that's just because I'm so used to the system I'm used to. There is an inherent cost of switching that is worth considering when you're thinking about using system? Are the benefits of moving to something that feels a little bit more intuitive to you or feels prettier or feels more exciting to work in?

Is that worth the trade off of having to learn a new system? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And I think that decision is different for everybody and at different stages of their business. It's also really different if it's just you switching. Or if it's you, plus a whole team of people that you have to manage the change management process and their training and they're convincing them that this is the right way to go.

Any other thoughts, questions, stuff you would like to consider?

I think that's enough. You gave me more work, but it's the work to get It's the

free work to get to the better situation.

Right. It's like, I can see the light, but I gotta go through that tunnel to actually get there.

Yep. And I think sometimes that pre work isn't worth it. And sometimes it makes a huge difference. And it ends up being the thing that frees up a whole bunch of brain space and energy and margin to be able to go do more fun things. Like nobody actually wants to be posting a blog post manually to Squarespace.

That's not that nobody's like desire of what do you want to do today? And I would like to post this thing in four different places and then put it in a database. Said no one ever. And so I think when we can use tools, we can use technology as a way to get to do more interesting, more fun kind of work, that's when it can be really, really powerful. What Melissa and I walked through wasn't just a strategy for organizing her content.

It's a way to actually build a single source of truth for your business. We focused on two different levers from the Calmer framework, business design and efficiency. We examined how to consolidate systems and reduce tool sprawl. So moving from default decisions and duct taped workflows towards an intentional design that supports how she actually wants to work. And we focused on creating efficiency but not the default version where we just cram more in.

Here efficiency means creating a single source of truth to reduce mental load, cut down on decision fatigue, and free up energy for more meaningful work. That's the essence of a calmer business. Not just cleaning up the surface, but changing the underlying design so your business supports you instead of you constantly propping it up. If you're listening and thinking, yep, this is totally me. I'm holding everything in my head or it's spread across a million actions.

Here's a tiny action to try this week. Just identify one system or tool you can consolidate or eliminate. Even if it's just moving one folder or archiving one app, that small decision is the first step towards more clarity and more calm.