Do you find that you regularly feel overwhelmed by the amount of things you need to do, and struggle to figure out how to balance the different tasks, chores, and duties in your life?
Or maybe you’ve got a particular dream you’d love to achieve, but can never seem to find the time or energy to make a real concerted push to achieve it?
Life can naturally be pretty hectic and chaotic, and whether you find yourself looking to sell your Rolex watch to cover unforeseen expenses this month, or having to down an entire pot of coffee to burn through a work deadline at the last minute, it can be tricky to feel in control all the time.
If you’re quite disorganised, getting more organised in your day-to-day life is the kind of thing that can, in many cases, help to expand your horizons and improve your experience of everyday life significantly.
Here are a few tips and suggestions for getting more organised.
Start by tidying and organising your living space and creating a cleaning schedule
Whether you agree or disagree with a lot of the other things she advocates for, Marie Kondo was certainly right that there’s a “life changing magic” to be found in tidying up.
If your home is tidy and organised, you will naturally feel more focused, organised, and in control in your life as a whole.
By contrast, trying to manage a carefully balanced and well-categorised to-do list, while your home is a complete mess, is likely to be pretty difficult.
Begin by tidying up and organising your living space, and creating a cleaning schedule to stick to, that helps you to keep things consistently neat and organised.
Practice the art of good time management, by scheduling your day out — and sticking to your schedule
Scheduling your day out in advance — either in the morning of the day itself, or the night before — can help you to get a lot more done, and to ensure that you fit in time for the activities you find most meaningful.
It just so happens that by scheduling your day out, and sticking to your schedule, you will also be training yourself in the vital skill of good time management, which is essential to being organised, as a whole.
Just don’t overdo it during your first attempts at scheduling. Schedule in some “idle time” too, and certainly some “fun time,” “family time,” and so on — instead of trying to make every minute of the day productive.
Use a system with an “inbox” element, that helps you to quickly categorise different tasks
Various systems and approaches for managing tasks and projects — most notably David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” Method — benefit from having an “inbox,” where you can drop any random tasks that occur to you during the day, with the idea being that you can then really easily categorise and schedule them when you have a moment.
A number of to-do list apps have this feature directly built in, too.
Doing things this way can help you to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the moment, while also not forgetting important details.
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