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Welcome coffee powered systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merten.

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So I’m almost afraid to admit how many online courses I own. It’s kind of ridiculous and probably borderline addiction, but I have been an entrepreneur for over ten years now, so I have accumulated a lot of courses along the way. Let’s say I might need a course rehab, but that is for another discussion. For today’s discussion, I received an email with yet another membership offer, I believe, or a course, and initially I thought it looked good. And then I remembered as I was walking through all the features that I already own a course that was teaching the same material. So instead of looking more into the one that I got a recent email about, I decided to look at the courses I already have. And when I went in there, it got me thinking that maybe I should organize my course library. I realized that this would be a huge benefit because I would already know what I own before I purchase or join anything new. And what I’m going to do today is walk you through my process that I went through and give you a link to the Google spreadsheet template that I created.

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I made it a template and I’ll give you the link in the show notes. You can find it at mirandamerten.com/course-list-template. But again, I’ll drop that down below for you so you don’t have to remember that. I knew I had a lot of courses, but after I went through all of my bookmarks and folders and confirmation emails, I added them to my new spreadsheet and counted them up. And yes, I have 105 courses that I’ve purchased throughout all these years.

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That is so many courses, and that doesn’t even include the ones that were dead links because the courses weren’t hosted anymore. So I don’t even know how many I have purchased over the years, including those. And I will say that I did purchase one bundle last month, which included like a crap ton of courses. I paid like $99 for it, and these are really popular now for some reason. They popped up everywhere and I’ve seen like three in the last month where you kind of just pay one price and you get a whole bundle of courses and you can go through, download what you want or what you need and forget the rest.

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So I did one of those recently, which probably added another like 20 courses. There were some pretty good ones in there, so I went ahead and downloaded a bunch of them, so I added those to my course sheet as well. Now, if you want to go ahead and do this process, like I said, if you already have them saved somewhere or check your confirmation emails or maybe they’re bookmarked or if you have a folder in your emails like your Gmail and that’s where you keep all your course logins. Go ahead and pull those up, open them up and that will make this process a lot easier.

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You’re going to go ahead and create a Google spreadsheet. If you want to use my template, you can grab the template or you can walk through I’m going to walk through the steps and kind of how my templates laid out and you can kind of recreate it for yourself. So open up a Google spreadsheet or you can do this in Excel as well. At the top of the table you’re going to have your overall header. So I have seven columns in my template. The first column is a done column with a checkbox in that column.

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So whenever I finish a course or when I was going through and organizing these, if I had already taken it then I checked it off. That just helps me mentally kind of as I’m scanning something. If I know that I’ve already taken a course and I’m looking for something specific, I can just go look at the ones that are check marked in a certain section. Or if I wanted to do something different, then I make sure to just mentally ignore the check marks.

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My next few columns I have the course name, the instructor, site login, username, password, and description or notes. Then after I do the main heading, I have broken them down into sections. So I have a bunch of different sections for my courses and basically they’re broken into topics. So the topics that I have on my course list and this could be different for you if you download my template. Of course you can just change them or delete the topics that aren’t relevant to what you’ve downloaded.

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But the ones I have on my list are email marketing, content and copywriting, website marketing, social media, design and graphics, offer and course creation, sales, tech, business, education and certification, and then other for anything else that kind of is weird and doesn’t really fall into that category.

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I did have like five of those and rather than making categories just for those things, drop them all into another bucket. So by breaking them down into sections by categories, it makes it easier for me to find what I need and it also lets me know what I have too much of. For me that was email marketing and copywriting. I have a ton of those. So you can definitely see if something comes through your inbox and you’re like, oh, it’s another email marketing thing, I definitely don’t need it now. I have two or three people that I follow for email marketing and I just stick with them and what’s coming out and I read their emails.

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The next thing I did was I also ordered the courses within their categories in the order that I want to take them next. So if I have eight courses on email marketing. I went through the list and I kind of know, based on the instructor, their teaching style, and then of course based on the course itself. So I know basically when I purchased the course, what it’s about and what they’re leading and what they’re teaching based on that, I put them in the order of what I wanted to do next and what I wanted to work on next.

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So that makes it super easy for me when I open up my course list. And if I wanted to do content creation and Jenna Kutcher has a course in there, then I can say that’s at the top of my list, I knew I wanted to do that next. I can just go ahead and click into that one. That way I don’t get kind of the squirrel shiny object jumping around. If I want to do a course, it’s at the top of the list, and I just go through that course next. That’s the focus of doing it that way. So I don’t get super distracted, because it’s really easy when you have all of these courses to get really distracted on what to do next.

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Along those lines, the ones I’ve completed go to the bottom of that section, so I’ll just drag and drop them to the bottom so I don’t have just random check marks everywhere. They’re all organized as well, nicely on the bottom of their section. So doing it this way was a game changer. It gave me a big bird’s eye view of what I have available to work on and a way to access everything quickly.

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I put this spreadsheet as a tab in my Toby homepage so that I can easily find it when I’m ready to browse through my courses. When I open up a tab on my browser, if I wanted to go look at courses immediately, I just click the tab that is for courses. Now, if you don’t know what Toby is, it’s a browser tab manager and I spoke more about it in episode 79 just a few episodes ago. You can find it at MirandaMerten.com/79.

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And if you have as many courses as I do, if you find that you have a ton of courses, or even if you just have 20 and you’re just overwhelmed with which one you want to tackle next, go ahead and also check out episode 51 where I discussed how you can work through your mountain of courses in a more organized way, avoiding that distraction syndrome, and you can find that MirandaMerten.com/51. So I’d love to hear if you have a system for your course management, reach out and let me know. Email me or tag me on Instagram at miranda merton. That’s all I have for today.

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I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee powered systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the Show show notes or on the website at miranda merten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, rate and review it in itunes or where you enjoy listening so others can find it too. And join me here next time. Bye.