We cover information about how to use features effectively, like the brand kit and magic tools, and how to organize your Canva account using folders to save time and boost productivity. 

Listen on the player on this page or on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast player. Or scroll down to read a full transcript.

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Guest Details

Connect with Brenda Cadman
Website | Instagram | Facebook

Brenda Cadman is a Canva Verified Expert from Prince Edward Island, Canada. After spending more than two decades supporting businesses with their website development needs, she now focuses on teaching small business owners how to use Canva more effectively and efficiently.

Brenda has taught thousands of business owners through her courses, and in particular, she loves to help business owners tame their hot mess Canva accounts by creating an organizational system that ensures they can spend less time in Canva, and more time doing what they love.

Takeaways

  • Declutter Your Canva Account: Create an “Archive” folder and move all old Canva designs and images into it to declutter the account.
  • Images in Canva: Organize images by moving them from the “Uploads” folder into custom categorized folders like “Images”, “Pizza” etc. using the bulk select and move features.
  • Differentiate Important Files: Star templates, elements, icons and photos in Canva that are used frequently by clicking the three dot menu to access them easily from the starred folder.
  • Streamline Branding: Use the Canva “Brand Kits” feature to organize company branding assets like logos, colors and fonts for quick access.
  • Save Time Using Canva: Canva Pro’s features can help save you time and repurpose content easily, using  tools like resizing, mock-ups, background remover and other AI-powered tools.
  • Don’t Postpone Decluttering: Set up a regular schedule (e.g. Fridays) for a VA or assistant to maintain the Canva organization system.
  • Don’t Overcomplicate it: Make most of the time you have, progress over perfection.

Resources Mentioned

Introduction to Canva – a free resource shared by Brenda

Canva Organization Roadmap – help organizing your Canva account

Listen to Episode 502 on 5 Ways to Declutter Your Life.

Transcript

Click for full script.

EBT530 – Brenda Cadman

Intro 00:00

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Megan Porta  00:37

The topic we talk about in this interview is something that I literally have never covered on the podcast before, which is a little bit strange to say, because Canva is a huge part of our lives as food bloggers. I know I’m in there just about every day if not every day, and you probably are too so why not have some conversations about it. Brenda Cadman from Brenda adman.com joins me. She is a Canva verified expert, and she has all kinds of tips for us. As far as getting organized inside of the tool. A lot of the stuff she talks about, I did not even know was possible. This episode is going to blow your mind especially if you’re like me, and you’ve got 1000s upon 1000s of Canva designs sitting in your Canva account. This is going to be a life changing episode for you like it was for me. It is episode number 530. And it is sponsored by RankIQ. 

Sponsor  01:34

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Megan Porta  03:05

Brenda Cadman is a Canva verified expert from Prince Edward Island Canada, after spending more than two decades supporting businesses with their website development needs. She now focuses on teaching small business owners how to use Canva more effectively and efficiently. Brenda has taught 1000s of business owners through her courses. And in particular, she loves to help business owners tame their hot mess Canva accounts by creating an organizational system that ensures they can spend less time in Canva. And more time doing what they love. Hi, Brenda. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? 

Brenda Cadman  03:41

I’m really well thank you for having me. 

Megan Porta  03:43

So excited to chat about Canva. I’ve never recorded an episode about Canva, which is honestly absurd. So this is very well timed. Thank you for showing up today with this information. 

Brenda Cadman  03:56

Well, it’s my pleasure. 

Megan Porta  03:57

Before we get into Canva though, do you have a fun fact to share with us? 

Brenda Cadman  04:00

Well, it seems particularly relevant today. And I was thinking, you know, what is the fun? What is something different than a lot of people with online businesses can’t say and I started my business long before social media existed. And that seems particularly relevant as you and I chat given that meta has just gone down worldwide. 

Megan Porta  04:21

I know I was just saying I yeah, I noticed that. And then I saw that it wasn’t just me and I was like hoof. 

Brenda Cadman  04:28

Hugely relieved that boy, the universe is giving me signs this last couple of days to diversify and to not just revenue sources, but also platforms that you you intend to market on. 

Megan Porta  04:40

It’s so true. Yeah. And not just the past few days or weeks, but the past year or two. It’s like a wake up call. I need to diversify big time. And that’s for all of us. I think. Would you mind Brenda just starting off by telling us a little bit about your business, your website when you started just give us a little rundown.

Brenda Cadman  05:00

Sure. So as I said, I started my business before social media was a thing, I actually have been an online, not just an online business owner been an entrepreneur since, oh, January 2000. So it’s been over 24 years now. And I’ve seen things change dramatically, but the majority of that time was spent running a website development company. And I actually just retired that in September 2020, to finally realize that I could not run the Canva education side of my business alongside running a website development agency, it was just too much. And I couldn’t do either of them the way that I wanted. And after 22 years, it was absolutely time to let go of that particular business. And now I focus 100% of my time on creating Canva content, and providing Canva organization and kind of digital storage organization and decluttering kinds of services.

Megan Porta  05:50

We need you. I’m so glad you showed up in my life, because this is honestly a huge pain point that I think a lot of us don’t address. It’s just something we trudge along carrying, because I personally don’t know how to handle my mess. I love Canva. Okay, let me start by saying that I love it, it’s the most amazing tool. I’m a graphic designer by trade, and it makes my graphic design life easier. I can imagine if you’re not a graphic designer by trade, that it makes your life even easier, because you don’t have any sort of design background. It’s like this magical thing where you can pick designs and templates and, and fonts, and oh, my gosh, you name it and put it into place and create an amazing design in just a couple of minutes. So with that said, I love Canva. But Brenda, my Canva account is a mess, please help. 

Brenda Cadman  06:41

You are in very good company. And what I find is that, you know, it’s particularly those folks who are kind of power users of the platform that suffer from this malady the most, because you are creating so much content, you’re probably some of the most frequent people to get those badges, those certification notification things that say you’ve created 1000, designs, 2000 designs, and you’re like, great, I it’s all in a big pile in my account, and I can’t find the things that I need. So it is important to actually use some of the features that are available in Canva. A lot of people don’t realize they’re even there in terms of creating essentially a Canva filing cabinet. You know, in order to be able to use that platform more quickly, more easily and not go down. I mean, it’s fun to go down the Canva rabbit hole, but you have a lot of other things you need to be doing, not just creating content in Canva. So figuring out a system that’s going to help you locate the designs and images you need as fast as possible. So you can get in, create what you need, get out and go do the other things important in your business to move the needle in your business. I think it’s really important that it you know, it’s not the sexy side of Canva. But it’s a really critical piece of it in order to use the platform effectively.

Megan Porta  07:54

So if you are one of those people like myself, who has literally 1000s of designs sitting in Canva, but I do yearn for that organization, where do I start with everything?

Brenda Cadman  08:07

I usually like to recommend a purge. To start with, I think we just I’m not sure if that was an O of Oh, no, I don’t know. I don’t want to do. And this is really that first stage, I think is where folks get really overwhelmed. And what you know, if you feel if you look at your Canva account, and your first response, if you feel your body just kind of sink down, and it’s not it’s contracting, it’s not expanding with excitement at the idea of finally cleaning things up. For some folks, it makes more sense to just start select, you know, create a folder structure moving forward and tackle the old stuff in bits and pieces as you can as you have the mental bandwidth and the emotional bandwidth to deal with it. But if you do, you have the interest in actually getting this cleaned up and essentially getting your Canva projects section to Inbox Zero. I really it’s important to do the deleting and the archiving. If you think about your Canva account, and all those designs and images, kind of like a physical office space. If you had piles and piles of paper, if you’re decluttering, a filing cabinet, you’re pulling everything out. You don’t want to be creating folders for stuff that is garbage or stuff that you just no longer you know, maybe it needs to go in some sort of reference library, but it is not something you’re going to need access to for your day to day life potentially. There’s no point in trying to create an organizational structure for things that don’t really need to be organized. So doing that initial deleting an archive and going through and finding you know the copies of designs you thought you would need and then you didn’t need or templates that you thought oh maybe I’ll use that someday now you realize you’re just hoarding them and you don’t need them. You can delete those or just the really old designs we all have them from the beginning of our Canva days where we look at them and they make us physically cringe because they are they’re the last thing we’re gonna use on our marketing now. And unless you’re holding on to some of those for nostalgia purposes, which I can also understand that’s kind of a fun little walk down memory lane. You know, those are things that you can let go of, and the things that you think you might need future reference to, or you just want to hang on to, because you’re not sure, maybe you will need it possibly down the road, creating a folder called archive. I know I’ve talked to one business owner who called hers the attic, and just putting all of those old designs and images there so that they’re there if you need to go, trudging along and finding them at some point. But if you find that after a year, you have not needed any of them, you’re probably going to feel more comfortable and confident actually deleting them and letting them go. And then once you’ve deleted everything, then you can start looking at what’s left. How does this chunk down into categories and what sort of folder structure is going to make sense to organize these,

Megan Porta  10:51

I love that idea of just creating just one folder called archive or whatever you want to call it, and just dumping everything there and taking out as needed. And kind of starting fresh. That feels really good to me. Because I am a Canva hoarder, I love that you use the word hoarder. Yep, that’s me. Yeah. Okay, so I might actually consider doing this. And then once I do the archive folder, how do I categorize after that? 

Brenda Cadman  11:21

So after that, it really is going to be on a very individual basis, there’s no one size fits all kind of response. And I know, folks just sometimes want to be told, tell me what my folder structure is. And I can just put it together. And that’s, you know, when they, you know, we end up working together sometimes if they really need the guidance on that. But what I will say is that there are certain kinds of folders that I think every business owner is going to need. And certainly bloggers, you’re going to need a folder for images, a lot of people are just uploading everything, all their images into that uploads folder, that is not a good plan. I am a staunch believer that that stop using that uploads folder because it becomes this bottomless pit of images. There’s no organization in there, I do VIP days for organization. And so I’ve been inside some pretty big accounts and inside those uploads folders, and there’s literally upwards of 2000 images sometimes in these folders. And I will find the same set of client photos or brand photoshoot images over and over like multiple times, because they could not find them any of the half dozen times they’ve previously uploaded them. So it’s faster to go find them again on their computer and re upload them rather than try to find them in their uploads folder. 

Brenda Cadman  12:33

So creating a custom folder called images, and then breaking that down into subfolders. For different, you know, subfolder categories, whether that’s by topic, or by, you know, if you have had styled stock imagery, maybe you will, one of the folders will be broken down by the source website, for example, everybody’s going to be a little bit different in terms of what they’re organizing and how they intuitively look for information. But I think it’s important to get those images out of uploads, get them into a custom folder system, which you can then access through the Projects tab in your design editor. And it’s going to be a lot easier to find those that specific sushi image that you want if you have some sort of category system that enables you to find it more quickly. So that right there big job to undertake, but massive timesaver going forward.

Megan Porta  13:23

Okay, I don’t even really know what you’re talking about. So I mean, I do because like I have a massive upload situation going on here. I’m looking at it right now. And it’s exactly what you described 1000s and 1000s of images, I’m sure a lot of them duplicates. So you’re saying to take these images, and to move them to a folder? 

Brenda Cadman  13:47

Yes, I am saying go to your project section and create a custom folder called what you can do in the top right corner that says Add New, I believe they keep changing the language a little bit. But if you add a new folder, you can create one called images, and then open that new folder and maybe create one called what would be what would be a type of food, the images you might have related?

Megan Porta  14:10

Or like maybe social media or Pinterest pins or something like that.

Brenda Cadman  14:13

So we’re talking talking specifically about images, so not designs.

Megan Porta  14:18

So a type of image. So maybe like, you know, a type of food or title or pasta or something like that.

14:24

There you go. Perfect pizza, let’s use that. So you might have a folder called images. And then within that there might be a subfolder called pizza. Now you’re able to create, you’re able to nest folders, 10 levels deep. So you’re gonna be able to create whatever filing system you need in order to support this. So if you had, you know, a top level folder, and then a category and then another subcategory, another subcategory, even if you went multiple levels down in order to create a filing system that’s going to make it easier for you to find those images later. You’re gonna have 10 levels to work with. So that’s going to give you a fair bit of depth. Again, everybody’s particular structure that is going to looks a little bit different. But once you’ve created those folders, if you go to uploads, you can select bulk select images, either by hovering over them and then checking them off, or you can drag to select them. Now, that’s a functionality that Canva introduced in September 2023, it’s still relatively new enough that a lot of people don’t realize that you can do this now where you can just click and drag to select multiple images. And then you can, you’ll see there’s a little folder icon that appears at the bottom middle of the page when you have your items selected, and you can click on that folder icon, and you can tell it where you want it to go. So you lump move it, and then in the future, just make a point of uploading those images directly into the custom folder instead of into uploads first. 

Megan Porta  15:46

Okay, this is mind blowing, and you have just changed my life. I’m not kidding. Well, I didn’t know that you can move files out of the upload area, this nightmare of a mess that I have here. 

Brenda Cadman  15:57

Most people don’t it is even those who are fairly prolific users of the platform and consider themselves very advanced, this is often one piece that they’ve never thought about doing it this way, or didn’t realize they could do it. And it just it’s gonna change your life in terms of the time you spend looking for images. 

Megan Porta  16:16

I cannot wait to do this. I’m really excited. What other ways can Canva change our lives? What other organization tips do you have?

Brenda Cadman  16:22

That’s my goal Megan right there.

Megan Porta  16:26

Got to have more though.

Brenda Cadman  16:28

Yeah, some other folders, you might want to help, definitely you’re gonna have a social media in a folder. Within that you might have it broken down by platform, maybe you have one that is Pinterest, and all your pins are in there. And maybe your pins are broken down by year again, really depends on how you look for information, everybody’s going to be a little bit different. What works for me may not work for somebody else. And the purpose of this is not to have a system that somebody else could use is to make sure that it’s a system that you and your team can use effectively. So I would say look at all of the content you’ve got, what are you creating, think about what are those big chunks of categories and start there and then work on creating sub folders as you need them, it’s hard to kind of know a perfect system right from the beginning, it’s going to take some modification, certainly in order to figure out what works for you. 

Megan Porta  17:17

Looks like I’ve actually created some folders, which is surprising to me. I didn’t know I did this. But I considering maybe you’ve just taking everything that I’ve created, putting it in archive, like we talked about, yeah, creating new folders, starting to go through those uploads, and organize those because I’m sure that takes up so much room just re uploading photos over and over, right? It’s unnecessary.

Brenda Cadman  17:42

you have storage to keep in mind, if you’re on a free plan, a Canva free plan, you’re only going to have five gigabytes of space, which if you have a lot of images is going to be eaten up very, very quickly. You have a terabyte of space on a Canva Pro Plan which is going to be a significant amount of space. I have never maxed that out. I don’t know anybody who has maxed that out. But it is still you know it’s a consideration in terms of the storage space, although the weight that it’s putting on your time is really more of my concern.

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Megan Porta  19:45

And then you can also star folders is that right? Yes. So they show up over on that left panel? 

Brenda Cadman  19:51

Correct. You can start folders. This is different than the starring functionality that exists that is more like favoriting things so you can also start templates you can Star, you know, elements, icons, photos, things like that those will all appear in your starred folder, which is one of the default folders can but provides in projects. So if you do see something along your, when you’re, you know, exploring and spelunking in the Canva elements library that you think you might want to use at a later date, you can start those and have that there, you can also save images that you want to refer to later into, again, into a custom folder system. If you want to be able to have a little more categorization of these, if you have a lot of patterns or icons or photos that you think you might want to refer to later, that are actually in Canvas library, and you’re not going to be able to organize them the way you would a traditional photo that you’ve uploaded, you can still you know, if you see it, hover over the three dots, and then you’ll see something that allows you to save it to a custom folder. So I do encourage looking at that as well. If you have a lot of content that you’re referring to on a regular basis, especially if you maybe have designs, reference designs that you’ve created in order to be able to quickly find those things, you can create a filing system instead to to organize that. But that’s one type of starring system. The folder starring is exactly what you said, it’s a way of pinning designs, favoriting folders rather not designs that you want to be able to have easy access to right from Canvas, right from your Canva homepage on the left hand side, and it’ll just pin them to the bottom of the menu on the left hand navigation. And then if you no longer need it, you can unstart And it’ll it’ll go away. It’s not deleting it, it’s just removing it from your favorites.

Megan Porta  21:31

I love this is going to be a game changer for me, too. I didn’t know that you could do that. Just being in the elements section, there are certain shapes and backgrounds that I use all the time. So I can just click those three dots and star it. And then it’ll show right up. Oh, my goodness, this was great. Okay, and then I had one more question, as I was looking out here, oh, just the thought I had was an idea for a project folder to start, which could be like logos, if you use a lot of logos. For designs, you could just do like brand logos or something like that. I feel like I’m always uploading the same logos to that poor uploads section when I don’t need to do that.

Brenda Cadman  22:14

And actually, what I’m going to suggest for branding for organizing your branding is don’t use custom folders for that use the brand kits feature. Now this is a Pro feature specifically, this is probably hands not probably hands down, this is the one thing that gets most folks who are using Canva for any sort of business capacity. If you’re making money from from your business, usually you’re going to have some sort of branding that you’re doing, whether it’s logo or color palettes or something like that. Creating your Canva brand kit is going to make sure that your logos, your color palette, your fonts, your brand imagery, including you know, your photos and your icons and your graphics that it’s all at hand within that brand area. So I mean, could you do it in custom folders, you could for the image content, but not for the fonts and for the color palettes. But this way, if you have it in the brand area, you’re going to have all of that ready to go. And again, you’re not going to have to go searching for hex color values, or… 

Megan Porta  23:11

I do it every time.

Brenda Cadman  23:12

Exactly, exactly. It’s it’s a big savings. And I think it’s important. A lot of times, we all have way too many subscriptions. And I know that, you know, I regularly will review and try to declutter my own kinds of online subscriptions that I have, like do am I really getting value from this? Am I really using this? Even if it’s a $7 a month membership? Am I using this or, you know, is this just money I’m throwing away, I’m happy to spend the money on things that I’m getting value from. And I will say that while Canva has one of the most robust free platforms I have seen in terms of what it includes and what you’re capable of creating. And there are a lot of people who will only ever need the free plan. I would say if you’re doing anything with that requires branding, or that requires you really quickly resizing and repurposing content, for example, a pin to an Instagram sized image. There are features in that Pro Plan that are going to be huge time savers. So it’s a matter of thinking about okay, how much is this costing me? But how much time am I clawing back? And what is my time worth? And what can I do with that time, that would easily make that money back many times over.

Megan Porta  24:24

And the cost of Canva for a year is not a huge investment. Honestly, it’s just over $100 to pay for that Pro Plan. I can’t remember exactly how much it is right now. But like you said, it is so worth it in the time that you’re gonna get back. The resizing I used so many times I love that feature. I also I’m trying to see what it’s called exactly. It’s the feature that allows you to schedule to social media, the content planner, content planner, I didn’t even know this existed until like a year ago. I found it kind of by accident, I think and it’s amazing. It’s robust, it’s reliable. It’s something that a lot of food bloggers don’t even know about honestly.

Brenda Cadman  25:05

I would hazard a guess that there’s a lot of features in Canva that a lot of people don’t know about. Because simply because they are iterating. Regularly, they are adding completely new features, they are refining features that already exist. Certainly, they’ve been putting a lot of time and energy and effort into their AI features. So Canvas magic studio is certainly an area that’s a lot of fun to play with. And again, a lot of those features are only available on the Pro Plan as well. But they have things like magic edit, and magic grab and magic erase and all of these things that just give you a lot more control over creating the specific kinds of imagery that you’re you’re looking for. It gives you a lot more flexibility in your design process. Are those absolutely necessary and foundational to being able to create professional looking content in Canva? No, they are definitely nice to have I can I can survive without magic edit. But it’s nice sometimes to be able to go well. I love this picture. But what if I just wanted to replace that, you know, vase in the background of that image with something with a stack of books instead? I don’t know what why I’d want to. But you know, you can do that quickly within the platform, it just gives you a little more creative control.

Megan Porta  26:17

Something really cool. So I haven’t used this in like real life, I’ve just experimented because I thought it looked cool. If you do the resize and magic switch, you can take any size of a document in Canva. And you can just like I’m looking right now browse by category, click on social media, okay, I want to create from this document that looks like a presentation, I can just click Instagram reel and continue. And it turns it into an Instagram reel like it completely resizes. It’s so crazy.

Brenda Cadman  26:50

You can even do things like I will sometimes work in Whiteboards, I’ve done trainings and presentations and things where we’ve been walking through the the collaboration features that avail are available in Canva, if you’re working with the team, and Whiteboards are definitely a part of that. And one of the trainings we did was talking about a writers room and how they’ve done all this kind of planning around timelines and things for this series that they were creating. And then we showed them how if they did all this brainstorming in the whiteboard, they were then able to convert it to you know, a different kind of document. I’m trying remember, we tried it, I think we transformed it to a blog summary or something like that. And all of a sudden it took all that information and just put it into a more usable format. So transform will also give you access to translating capabilities. If you wanted to translate something into another language. Be careful with that. Because unless you can, whether or not it’s accurate, you may want to be cautious with that. But my understanding is that it does a pretty good job. So there’s all these different ways to save time, that will allow you to repurpose content. And I think for a lot of online business owners, I mean our time, yes, we want to save budgets as well. But the time is that one resource that we just can’t get more of. And we need to be able to do more with the time that we have. So there are some of these features like the resizing and the you know, all these different kinds of repurposing features that really do allow us to create more content in in less time.

Megan Porta  28:20

It’s so true, I was just looking at the app section, I hadn’t looked at this in a while.

Brenda Cadman  28:25

That’s a big ol rabbit hole. 

Megan Porta  28:27

So you can do like mock up. So if you do anything where maybe you’re displaying something on a smartphone, or looks like they have a mug for, for an example, or like on a monitor, it’s really cool what you can do in here and super easily.

Brenda Cadman  28:44

The app section. I mean, there’s a lot of third party apps in there some you know, the quality is questionable, in my humble opinion, but the actual native Canva apps, so that mock ups one, for example. That was initially when it was first introduced, it was a smart mock ups, the smart mock ups brand an integration from their platform, and I believe Canva bought them so it was integrated actually into one of their own apps. And it’s very robust in terms of what you can create any kind of mock up you think you might possibly want to put one of your Canva designs on or a logo on, you can mock that up in that area. That’s a fun play. That’s definitely a higher quality app. But again, just be I would say, form follows function, figure out what you actually want something to do what you need it to do, rather than finding ways to fit bells and whistles into your designs start with what do I what am I trying to create? What’s the purpose of creating this? What am I trying to do in my business? And then create according to that, as opposed to going the other direction, if that makes sense? 

Megan Porta  29:46

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I have to mention this too, because I think a lot of food bloggers might find value in this section the product photos. Yes, you can do it looks like you can just knock out the background pretty easily. Is that right? 

Brenda Cadman  29:48

I will say that I haven’t experimented in that area a whole lot. But I do know that they are definitely highlighting that when you go to the app section, it’s usually pinned there, right on the left hand side. So that’s worth a the play. 

Megan Porta  30:08

Yeah, that’s so cool. Okay, anything that we’re missing that you feel, would help us to organize or streamline our businesses?

Brenda Cadman  30:16

I mean, ultimately, it’s just a matter of carving out the time to do it, I know that the organization piece can feel completely overwhelming, depending on how long you’ve been using Canva. If you’re new to it, you know, it’s a perfect time to set up your system before you do feel overwhelmed by all the content that you’re ultimately going to create. But I would, I would, you know, give yourself grace, if you are a veteran user of the platform, and it just feels like Oh, my goodness, there’s no way I’m going to be able to conquer this hot mess, it’s just, I’m just gonna have to start from scratch. You can, it may take some time. And if you’re somebody who likes to, you know, knock it out as a single day or two project, go, do what works for you and your own energy levels. If you prefer to, you know, chip away at it over time, that works to set a time in your calendar or your project management tool to tackle it, 15-20 minutes here and there, but just do it consistently. And then once you do have it under control. Even the best system, if it’s not maintained, is going to fall apart. So staying on top of it, whether that’s at the end of the day, just quickly filing away anything you’ve created, or carving out a bit of time once a week to do that. Again, it depends how much content you’re creating, and how often you need to do that. But creating those, you know, a little better Canva organization hygiene as it were, yeah, it takes a bit of time to create those habits. But it is going to save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

Megan Porta  31:41

And you mentioned before I think it was before we started to record that you would listen to my decluttering episode recently. 

Brenda Cadman  31:41

I did. 

Megan Porta  31:44

So I would say go back and listen to that episode. It was published very recently here in 

Brenda Cadman  31:45

I think it is Episode 502. 

Megan Porta  31:49

502, okay, go listen to that. And you can incorporate this whole plan of organizing Canva into that decluttering if you are compelled to do that, I think this falls in perfectly. So I’m glad you mentioned that. And then oh, I was also gonna say one more thing that came to mind as you’re talking, if you have a VA or somebody who helps you maybe you could set up a system where it’s like on Fridays, go into Canva and kind of organize right so that they could take care of it for you. So it’s a regular thing, and you’re not constantly going in feeling overwhelmed by your Canva designs.

Brenda Cadman  32:30

Absolutely. 100%, I’m glad you brought that up. Because if you are feeling kind of, you know, a little bit paralyzed when you’re looking at doing this, you need to provide the guidance of what the folder structure looks at alike, but you don’t necessarily have to be the one to actually move the things into the folders. So as long as you know, if your VA or your OPM is going to be actually searching for content, if you have any team members who are going to need to be able to find things in your Canva account, then you definitely want to make sure that the structure, you’re creating the organizational folder structure, you’re creating something that not work. That doesn’t work just for you, but it works for other people as well. But if you have team members who can take this off your plate, work with them to figure out what that structure looks like understanding that you may need to refine it over time if it’s not working for you. But it gives you a starting point, they can get it cleaned up, certainly they can at least tackle that uploads folder and start providing some categorization and organization to your images. And then it’s going to feel a lot less, it’s gonna feel a lot more doable if you have a smaller project to review rather than 1000s of images. And designs that just kind of are a great big pile.

Megan Porta  33:39

I didn’t even know that this was clutter in my mind, but it definitely is. And you brought this to light. And I’m just so grateful for this inspiration. I’m totally going to tackle this coming week. So thank you so much, Brenda.

Brenda Cadman  33:52

Happy to be of service.

Megan Porta  33:53

Glad that Canva is your thing and that you showed up today to talk about it. Do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with?

Brenda Cadman  34:01

I’m not a big quotes person. But there is kind of a little saying that has been a bit of my mantra in recent months and not yours. It’s something I’m working on constantly, but maybe it’s been benefiting me and maybe it’ll benefit somebody else and that is, Don’t overcomplicate it, I fall into the trap of constantly overcomplicating things, you know, oh, that blog post is not quite right yet I’ve got to get just the perfect screenshot for it or whatever it is, you know, things don’t have to be as complicated as we are probably making the most of the time and you know, progress over perfection. Get it out there, get it done. And you know, you don’t it can be easy, you can get yourself you can let it let the ease into it. We don’t have to work quite so hard as we probably are doing so so stop overcomplicating it.

Megan Porta  34:50

That is a lesson that I’ve been learning as well too. And actually I have a post it note right here that says this very thing. So we are in alignment with that I’m glad you mentioned all of that. We’ll put together a show notes page for you if you want to go peek those head to eatblogtalk.com/brendacadman. Tell everyone where they can find you Brenda and also mention anything you’re offering right now.

Brenda Cadman  35:13

Sure, if you want to find me and all all my offers, just going to BrendaCadman.com is the best place to go. And if you are interested in tackling your Canva clutter, I do have a free Canva organization roadmap that will take you through kind of a five step process that you can use to start, you know, knocking away at that buildup of designs and images and that is on the website, but you can find it directly at BrendaCadman.com/roadmap.

Megan Porta  35:41

Everyone go check that out. Thank you again, Brenda so much for being here and thank you for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time. 

Outro  35:50

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk, please share this episode with a friend who would benefit from tuning in. I will see you next time.


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