Do you feel that you are all over the place? That your life is all over the place? Does the never halting time that doesn’t even wait for anyone or anything overwhelm you? Whatever the case, getting your life organised may seem like a daunting task or something that seems to need so much discipline that you might not even give yourself a chance to try it out. It really isn’t though. If you are a beginner in the whole idea of organising life, then this post is for you.
Here are three small but very significant steps that you can take to organize your life right now. These are actual linear steps that you can take one at a time in the said order to start making a difference. Notice I said to start making a difference. It is important to note that, because, if you think your life can just turn to become perfect within a mere small step or a single day, you are just asking for failure and disappointment. Change takes time. The time that is adorned with patience and perseverance.
Step 1: Create a Planning System in Place
If you have done your fair share of searching “how to organise your life”, you probably already heard this multiple times. If you haven’t, here it is. The first step to take to organise your life is to actually just organise it in imagination. Really. Organise your life into a written plan. You can either buy one of those fancy planners, start bullet journalling, sign into google calendar or just scribble out on a notepad, a sheet of paper or even your hands (don’t do the last one though, that’s just.., yeah!).
If you are one of those people that think that taking the time to sit down and write up a plan and make decisions is just a waste of time then keep in mind that the time taken to plan is not wasted time at all. If you think about it, what makes your life unorganised is when everything feels all over the place and you don’t know where to begin, when to continue, where to move or what to look for. And you stand in the middle of a pile of all that unorganised mess of your physical as well as your mental space trying to decide. That overwhelming decision making is what we do in the planning stage. So that you know exactly what to do when and don’t forget anything important.
And the first step of making a plan is to create a system in place. You can choose from any of those former options that I gave or be creative and make your own style. You could either sum up all aspects of your life into one system if that is what would make you less overwhelmed or you could make separate ones for your personal life, school/work, etc. This is also a way to give your brain and mind a breather by not having to hold onto so many things in your head (which leads to forgetting important things at important occasions), and letting out any and all things you want or should do into a tangible place so that you can see it all more clearly and efficiently.
Your planning system must be able to incorporate your goals and to-dos, be it on a daily basis, a weekly one, monthly, or yearly. The basis of the plan should be to lay down all the things that you should be doing and all that you want to do and then allocating time for each. You can start off by marking the fixed time slots such as your school or work hours and then start allotting time for others into the slots that are left.
Step 2: Create Routines
Now that you have a solid system or systems in place where you can plan your days and weeks and months and so on, let’s try to make it even simpler. It is said that success derives from good habits. In a way, our daily life really is an accumulation of habits; and our happiness probably derives from how good or bad those habits are. And habits are formed from routine actions. So, that’s what the next step is. Take the time to sit down and create some solid routines so that each time you have to do something you wouldn’t know what to do or where to start.
A good example of where you can make a routine plan is for your mornings. Making a morning routine that you can follow each time you wake up can make your mornings run so much easier and smoother. Similarly, the nighttime routine would help in the same way.
Some other examples where you can make routines is for your exercise plans, cleaning your home, sitting down to get some work done at your desk, etc. The routines are basically like organised guidelines or checklist that tells you what steps to take first, second, third and so on so that you don’t find yourself stuck thinking of what to do because ‘what to do’ is already written down for you.
Making routines also help in planning out your days when you don’t know how to organize your time. You can just write down ‘morning routine’ in the slot of the time you usually wake up to the end of your routine. If you need an example, an ideal morning routine may (but doesn’t have to) look something like this: starting from 5:00 am to 8:00 am and includes spiritual practices and prayer, reading, workout, shower and dress up, and breakfast. Again, this is just one example and it can change depending on the person and their priorities.
Step 3: Take Baby Steps
The third and final step is the action phase. All your planning systems and routines are of no significance if you don’t put them into practice. At the end of the day, taking action is really what will give you results. So in this phase, one important tip that I can tell you is that while taking action, take baby steps. As I already made a note at the beginning of the post, you can’t expect to make huge changes overnight. Trying to do so will only land you up in a bad burn-out too soon. So start small and work your way up. Take tiny achievable steps that do not require the brain to think too much about.
One way to do this is by writing down a to-do list or more like a checklist of sorts. Write down the first smallest step that you need to do right now to get started and then work your way through everything else. For example, if you are starting out on organising your life, your first baby step may be to make a plan. But then the whole process of making a plan can be overwhelming and huge in itself. So you can break that down into even more smaller steps. Perhaps, the first would be to decide what your planning system would be. Then actually taking a hold of it. Then sitting down and starting to write down your priorities and goals. And so on.
Thinking only about that one small step that you can take right now (like physically going and sitting down at your desk) followed by the next small step (opening up your planner) and doing those actions, rather than thinking about the end result (your whole life planned out A-Z), will make your life so much easier and much less overwhelming.
There you go. That’s the 3 steps to organize your life. Of course, this is not the ultimate or the only way to do it. But for someone just beginning to think about getting their life together or someone who is overwhelmed about the whole idea, this could be a great place to start. I hope this was useful for at least some of you out there.
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