Keeping life organized often feels like a demanding task. Just as quickly as you move to catch one ball—finances, family commitments, or fun with friends—the next one is dashing towards you. Inevitably, some balls are bound to fall. This often leads to neglecting sleep, eating fast food instead of healthy meals, and putting off tasks to focus on deep work.
Instead of hurling tasks in the air in hopes you will somehow manage to catch them all, try to follow a framework to keep every area of your life organized. In today’s article, we will discuss some ways to organize your life.
How to Organize Your Life
1. Develop Good Habits and Build a Routine
We all have habits that have been planted in our lives over the years and routines that establish our actions without conscious thought. The main question is whether these habits are deliberate or simply the result of inertia.
Good habits enable us to achieve long-term success and make us feel good about ourselves. Bad habits steal our time, health, happiness, and money. Take a look at the habits in your life to observe what is working, what must go, and what new habits can help you to reach your goals.
Once you have developed the habits you need in your life, gather them in a daily routine that will help you to be productive. When you have good habits and can sequence them together into a vigorous routine, you can depend less on momentary motivation and leave no room for procrastination and distraction.
2. Plan Ahead
This is one of the essential ways to organize your life. Life is full of unpredictable twists and turns. That doesn’t mean a little planning doesn’t go a long way. A task manager and a calendar are the tools you need to think ahead, plan, and organize your life.
Allot time to map out your days and plan your weeks. When you know which day your presentation is due, you can work backward and add to-dos to your list to get it done. If you know the date and amount of your insurance premium, you can arrange your funds accordingly.
Of course, the emphasis is on being ‘well-planned.’ By scheduling each task on your calendar and adding all your responsibilities to your to-do list, you can work within the borders of your week to provide focus to everything vital to you.
3. Don’t Procrastinate
The longer you wait to finish a task, the harder it will be to get it done. If you want your life to be less stressful and anxiety-free, start organizing it as soon as possible. Putting in the effort to do things as soon as possible lifts the burden off you of doing them later.
As an experiment, think of something that you should organize in your life. Note it down. Then note down when you can do it and what you require to get it done. If you can do it right now, then do it without wasting time.
4. Prefer Consistency Over Perfection
For many, an “all-or-nothing” attitude can be a source of self-destruction. When we fail to meet the impractical expectations we set for ourselves, we give up altogether. By realizing the impact of incremental progress and the power of consistent effort, we can be more rational about getting more out of life.
The first step is to create realistic plans that fit into our lives. Impractical plans set us up for a spiral of shame and regret when we eventually fall short of our goals. Make consistency a part of your life and learn to embrace imperfections. By choosing continuous effort towards a realistic aim, we can create more space for everything we want to do in life.
5. Declutter Regularly and Keep Only What You Need
Find time every week to organize. Highly organized people set aside time each week to keep their things in order. Things do not stay organized on their own; they need to be reorganized constantly and consistently. The more things you have, the more clutter you create. Organized people only keep what they need and what they want.
Having fewer things also means that you will enjoy those things more and feel better about using everything you have rather than letting most of what you own collect dust. Have you ever felt you don’t have the room to keep all your stuff? Instead of renting a storage unit or buying a larger home, get rid of some useless things.
6. Find Balance
In our attempt to do everything and to organize our lives perfectly, balance is often a victim. Instead of getting to bed, you stay up late at night. Rather than meeting with friends or family, you work all weekend to complete your presentation. While this plan can work in the short term, the long-term effects eventually show their ugly faces: stress, burnout, and lethargy.
Instead, prioritize long-term balance and self-care.” — reads smoother and avoids “instead of it. Besides taking short daily breaks to breathe and reset, try to make time for longer breaks. Try to take week-long breaks from work once or twice a year. By continually recharging your batteries, you’ll be able to show up at work and in life more effectively for yourself and those who depend on you.
Read More: 9 Ways To Get More Out of Your Life
7. Measure Your Progress
Whether your goals are big or small, it is vital to measure your progress. There is a lot of power in identifying what is working and what is not. You can assign more time in your life for activities helping you reach your goals. You reduce the things that are failing to impact you positively.
Have a regular weekly review where you reflect on the week and trim your to-do list to only the essential tasks.
8. Automate or Outsource
Habits mechanize your decision-making. Technology has the ability to automate your repetitive jobs. Organize your life by employing automation that removes the need for active effort and frees up your time and energy.
Think about the areas in your life where you spend time on repetitive tasks that an app or website could automate. Alternatively, consider outsourcing some tasks to someone else, saving you time.
9. Allot Responsibilities
A truly organized life doesn’t mean being overwhelmed with responsibilities, meetings, and deadlines. In fact, it has less because things that cause stress have been effectively organized out. As a trial, have a look at your to-do list or make one.
Go through the list and find one task you can remove from your plate or delegate to someone else. Now feel the stress of having to do it fade away.
Conclusion
These are some of the best ways to organize your life. Can you remember how you organized your life as a child or a teenager? Nothing has to change now. All you need to do is replace the bad habits you’ve built over the years with good ones. Learn from these organizational tips and try to make them your habits one by one. Gradually you will become a lot more organized and efficient.
