How many times have you promised yourself this would be the year that you get more organized? The year that you start feeling serenity and peace around where you are spending your time. Most women attribute their disorganization to personality traits, “oh I’m just lazy” ,“I’m so busy” ,“I just don’t have the time”.
But in reality its not you or that you need more time, its that you need a proven method and system to stay organized. Having a system that helps us organize our DESIRES, then steps to achieve them, and techniques to maintain the course is key. As we learn in the book Atomic Habits:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear
This affects all areas of your life but it is especially critical to your career and growth. According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, 68% of working women who use time management techniques report feeling satisfied with their job performance, compared to only 30% of those who do not. (Source: American Psychological Association, 2019).
By understanding what we truly want out of life, making goals to achieve that, and implementing methods to sustain our organization you can build a life you’re proud of. Here is the proven top-down approach to organizing your time and in turn your life.
How to be organized with your life
As women we are raised to follow certain scripts, whether subconsciously or not we are are told what makes a “good girl” and a “bad one”. Much of this bleeds into adulthood where we design the textbook life but always feel something is missing. So we follow the latest hacks, habits, etc. that we are sold will make us complete.
This makes it easy to fall off of good habits particularly getting organized. When we are buying things we don’t truly want it is easier to be disorganized with our money. When we are holding on to a job that doesn’t fulfill us, it is easy to be late to meetings. Our intuition drives us to failure when it comes to being organized because deep down we don’t care. The good habits you so desperately need will become a lot easier once you become very clear about what you want out of your life. Only then can you analyze the habits you need to implement to get there. Here are some methods to help you figure out what that is.
Write your own eulogy
Now I know this sounds a little morbid, but here me out. Many people have completely changed their life after facing life threatening situations. The reason being it makes death a reality, it makes one realize that we wont live forever and it brings a new sense of purpose. Writing your eulogy will get you as close to this experience as possible without comprising your safety. Before writing I recommend you spend just 5-10 minutes reading your local obituaries. Simply google Your City Obituaries, reading about others’ life can give you an idea of what you want and don’t want for yours. Now take some time to imagine your own funeral, visualize it in vivid detail. Think about:
- Who is present at your funeral?
- Are you cremated or in a casket? Or something else?
- Who is crying the most?
- Who are you surprised to see there?
- Who is the person reciting your eulogy?
Once you can truly imagine it get a blank notebook and pen and get to writing. Describe the person you want them to describe you as. Are you kind, ambitious, bitter, brave, funny, thoughtful, stubborn, or inspiring? Describe your life as if it was behind you. What adjectives do you want to hear when someone talks about you? What stories would they tell? After filling out at least two pages take a moment to pause and reflect on this experience. Then go back with a different colored pen and without reading the whole find and circle all the adjectives. These adjectives represent the person you want to become. Now looking at those adjectives you can identify ACTIONS that will lead to becoming your best and truest self.
What does Level 10 for you mean?
Another way to understand what you want out of life is to analyze your current life using the Level 10 Life productivity method. Coined by Hal Elrod in his book The Miracle Morning this method focuses on evaluating 10 categories that deeply impact your happiness and success. For todays purpose lets look at the level 10 life categories:
- Health and Fitness
- Physical Environment
- Gift and/or Contributions
- Fun and Recreation
- Marriage or Relationship
- Career
- Finances and Expenses
- Spiritual
- Personal Development
- Family Members and Friend
Rate your satisfaction/success from 1-10 in each of these categories. Be honest with yourself, are you proud of where you stand today? How satisfied are you with your contributions, how much fun are you having?
Understanding your baseline in the areas in your life that are not optimized will be a critical step in getting organized. People who stay organized are aware, in one way or another, of these 10 areas and are constantly working towards improving in them on their terms. They are consistent and capable of doing this not because they are better than you or have some super dedication but because they have DONE THE WORK. This is the work above, to gain clarity in what they want out of life, because once you are following your true calling the action is seamless. Motivation is no longer a requirement but rather a SYMPTOM that results from living a journey build by you and for you.
Copy and Paste
Finding our life purpose and what drives us can sometimes be a daunting task. For women, many of us are conditioned to “stay in our lane,” to avoid big dreams, and to be grateful. Years of stereotypes and limitations will cloud our judgement leaving us thinking “I don’t know what I want”. It can be useful to look around, ideally at people you know and can communicate with, and copy what they are doing.
Now, you may not know of someone whose life you would copy exactly. Rather, think of someone who acts in ways that you would rate very highly in one of your level 10 categories. For example, if your rating in gifts/contributions is low think of someone who gave you a thoughtful gift. Or perhaps someone who donates or volunteers for the less fortunate often. Ask them how they do it, what is their philosophy around gifts and contributions and “paste” that into your plans.
Do this copy and pasting exercise continuously for any category you are scoring yourself less than a 7. Austin Kleon says in Steal Like an Artist:
“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.”
Austin Kleon
Isn’t that what life is all about, finding ourselves? Living in our truth facilitates our path to achieve our goals. Complete these exercises and you will see a huge motivation in getting and staying organized. Ultimately you are not consistent because your destination is unclear, by understanding what you want out of life you can design it and make it a reality. From there, the motivation to maintain it becomes seamless.
How to be organized with your goals
Once you understand what you want out of your own life you should be aware of some goals you want to achieve. Goal setting has become such a widespread phenomenon that everyone thinks they are achieving #goals when most of the time they are simply following in the latest trends. Here are three steps to organize your goals.
Identify your priorities
This should be simple if you followed the steps to organize your life above. I like to set goals in each of the level 10 categories to ensure I am improving overall. But my priority will always be in the lowest scoring category. Not because you need to be at level 10 on all categories, actually you may never be, but because your lowest category is probably causing you considerable pain. I have noticed that getting at least to a score of 7 means I am generally happy in that area of my life. Therefore, prioritize your categories from worst scoring to highest.
Effective Action Steps
For your lowest scoring categories think of 1-3 actions that would make your rating better by improving 1%. For example, if you consider health to be one of your lowest scores and feel incorporating exercise into your life would increase the score. You might set a goal that reads “Be more active”.
Refine the goal
Saying you want to be more active is not a goal. Understanding your baseline and improving from there is a goal. If your exercise baseline is zero improving from there would be the goal. I recommend your goals follow the rules of continuous improvement. Start with 1% improvement. Let use some math to see what this means:
- Current activity: 0 hours per week
- Available hours per week: 168 hours per week
- 1% of the available hours/week: 1.68 hours per week (168*1%)
- 1% of the available hours/day: 0.24 hours per day → 14.5 minutes/day
- If after seeing what 1% looks like, your initial reaction isn’t “oh I can totally do that”. Cut the number in half until you get that reaction:
- So if you cant do 14.5 minutes/day, can you do 7.25 minutes/day?
- What about 3.6 minutes/day?
- What about 1.8 minutes?
- Refine until you feel it is doable for your current situation. You want to set a goal that seems achievable but also that you will be proud of.
Establish a deadline
Determine in how long will you measure if your habit has stuck? I recommend at least quarterly. Having a deadline adds a sense of urgency and a realization that our life is not infinite. We have all heard the idea it takes 20-30 days to build a habit. Reviewing your goals quarterly (every 90 days) gives you enough time to make a dent while accounting for the realities of life (think sick days, emergencies, events, etc.)
Make the commitment
Reiterate your goal and put it in writing. So our health goal would become: Move my body at least X minutes/day for the next 90 days.
Find a place you can store these goals and their deadlines so you can reevaluate when appropriate. Personally, I recommend pen and paper that you have access to often but anything you wont lose sight of works. Setting detailed and realistic goals against YOUR current baseline will set you up for success.
How to be organized with your time
Once you set your goals you need to find the time, within the same 24 hours that we all have, to work towards those goals. Start by implementing small chunks of time everyday, be patient and give yourself grace.
“If you want to have patience with your dream, you have to work on it every single day for at least 30 minutes, or else don’t fool yourself it’s going to happen.”
Brendon Burchard
Thirty minutes to work on anything is not a significant time of your day, but over weeks, months, and even years of consistently showing up you will gain momentum. Finding those thirty minutes is your biggest hurdle. But it is one that millions of people find every single day, people with more responsibilities than you, less resources, and less talent. It all starts with taking control of your time by being intentional and fearless. To give time to your goals you have to take away the time you are giving to achieving other people’s goals.
Learn to say No
We have all been there, being invited to that meeting, party, get together, etc. that you just aren’t feeling. But to spare someone’s feelings, to avoid looking confrontational, or worse lazy, you say yes or even a little brave and say maybe. But the best piece of advice I ever heard was:
“if its not a HELL YES, its a NO!”
If you find yourself thinking even for one second that you don’t want to be there you don’t, and you shouldn’t. Our time is so precious, yet we squander it religiously to save face or to be nice. But learning to say no to the things that aren’t aligned with your goals will not only give you the time to achieve your goals but will gain you admiration from those who truly support you.
In his book Essentialism, Greg McKeown guides you through finding what is essential to your life and how to make that the priority. He discusses how every time we agree to something we are saying no to something else:
“The more we think about what we are giving up when we say yes to someone, the easier it is to say no.”
Greg McKeown
This is why it’s helpful to have your goals nearby as your guide. Any request that not aligned with your goals is taking time away from achieving those goals. Make sure you are not living to fulfill the goals of others. This is your permission to own your time and start saying no. I promise it will get easier with time. And if the idea of using “No” as a full sentence makes you cringe, start by saying “let me check and Ill get back to you, by when do you need a response?”
Be intentional with your time
In talking to a friend one day she expressed her concern over watching too much TV. She realized she was spending too much of her free time on this and was concerned. “It just relaxes me so well”. Unfortunately, many women correlate relaxation with guilt. But relaxation is a critical piece of recovery and productivity. I find relaxation to reach peak benefits when I am intentional about it. If I want to watch TV to wind down there is a critical piece that makes it guilt free and that much more refreshing. I am intentional about it. This was the advice I presented my friend:
- Ask yourself, before turning the tv on, what you want to watch a movie, an episode, and entire season?
- How much time do you think you need to relax? There is no wrong answer here sometimes you might feel like you need 4 hours, sometimes 15 minutes. Whatever, the time is for you embrace it.
- Then set a timer for that time.
- Enjoy your recovery.
- When the timer goes off get up from the couch, bed, floor whatever you are relaxing on and go to another room.
- Wait a few minutes and if you need to relax longer repeat the process from step 1 but this time ask yourself if another activity might be more helpful. If not, repeat.
The point here is to be intentional with your recovery to ensure it doesn’t bleed into laziness. Time awareness is absent in some activities and we can easily lose an entire evening to the algorithms of Netflix and Instagram.
Time-management methods
In order to “purchase” any of the goals you set above you must “pay” for them with time. Luckily this is the equalizer of humans because we are all given 24 hours in a day. The difference comes in what we do with those hours, in other words how many time-management tools do we have in our toolbox. Here are two that have worked wonder’s for me.
Time-blocking
Many people have heard about time blocking as a time management method, in which you divide your day into blocks of time dedicated to specific tasks or activities. You basically make appointments with yourself. For example, work on project ABC from 10am to 12pm. During that time you are dedicated to working on the task. This works well if you are in the office and have a consistent schedule. Your status shows busy or in a meeting preventing unnecessary distractions. I use this technique to meet work deadlines and make sure I make progress on projects.
Weekly To-Do Lists
Time-blocking becomes less effective for your personal life, where your schedule is more flexible. Specifically, once you become a mother, time-blocking methods become futile. Children do not run on a schedule some days. Time-blocking a workout into your day while your baby is having a meltdown will only add more stress and frustration. Weekly to-do lists are much more effective. However, I evaluate my to-do list daily based on the principles from the bullet journal method. Here are the pieces of my weekly setup:
- Weekly overview of events/appointments
- Review yearly goals to see what tasks need to complete this week. I focus on my lowest scoring categories here.
- Review uncompleted tasks from the previous week that I still want to pursue. This is a critical part to practice saying no. If the task didn’t get completed in a week does it need to be done at all? Is it going to get me closer to my goals? If you answered no to any, deprioritize the task. If you answered yes to ALL then schedule it again this week.
- Decide top 3 tasks for the week based on my goals review.
- Note: for big projects it may be helpful to assign time allocated tasks. For example, research hotels for 30 minutes would be a task that would work towards your goal of “taking a family vacation to Disneyland”.
Having a week to complete tasks is much more reasonable when you are in the trenches of motherhood or just need more flexibility day to day.
No technique will be useful through every phase of your life. Give these two a try and see which fulfills your needs better week to week.
How to maintain your organized life
One of my favorite times to go shopping is in January. I love to see all the new planners, stickers, labels, and stationery front and center at every store. Because every new year people think getting a planner will keep them organized. But the reality is not even the cutest most expensive planner or sophisticated app will keep you organized if you don’t use it. What you need is to make it an automatic part of your daily life, on other words a habit.
How to make being organized a habit
Building progress in your organizational skills requires making it a habit. In Atomic Habits, James Clear states to create a good habit you must follow four steps.
James Clear, Atomic Habits
Make it Obvious
Don’t trust yourself to check in on your life. Set calendar hits for every quarter to review your goal progress. I set an alarm every Sunday night at 9pm to setup my weekly dash board. Make it physically obvious by using bright colored notebooks/planners that call your attention. If you use planning apps set them on your home screen.
Make it Attractive
This is my favorite. For me I love aesthetic palettes and also bright colors. Make sure to choose planners and notebooks you love! Personalization is also helpful. My whole life I have been very particular about how a pen glides on paper, once I find a pen I love I buy like 50 and have them handy. Point is you have to love your materials to use them.
Make it Easy
Personally, the easiest path has been a pen and paper that I can carry everywhere. I save apps and digital tools for very long term planning or heavy number calculations like finance goals and trackers. But the day to day is analog. While I love technology, think of all the barriers that come with planning or organizing with apps. First unlocking your phone, then finding the app, then making sure none of the 200 other apps in your phone distract you first (and they will distract you), before finally arriving to your destination. To make sure I always have my notebook/planner with me I have a dedicated bag with all my essentials. My crap bag (F.R.I.E.N.D.S fans rejoice) is always by my side. Even at home this bag travels with me from bedroom to laundry, upstairs, downstairs, outside always an arms length away.
Make it Satisfying
There are so many studies proving the benefits of getting organized. Specifically, studies found that 77% of individuals feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when they can cross items off their to-do lists. Other studies show this feeling is attributed to the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. Start with building the habit of crossing things off. Also helpful is to share your work, when I create a goals dashboard or a crush my habit tracker I always share it with a friend who is supportive.
Try implementing these four steps to make organization a lifelong habit. When you get off track come back to where you are, small steps lead to big improvements. Like any habit, the hardest part about getting organized is the maintenance. The best advice I can offer is to let go of perfectionism and be mindful of the stage you are at. There are times I go days without checking in or trying to be productive. Rather than beat myself up about it I try to listen to what my body and mind are signaling. Once you get back into your routine you can come back to these steps and continue your journey.
Yes, you can teach yourself how to be organized
You may not want to hear this but being organized is not a personality trait. Like all good things in life it is a habit. It is work. But the rewards bleed into every part of your life. Imagine feeling like you are in control of your time, never being double booked again, and achieving the goals you didn’t think you had time for. It starts with a top down approach that is in alignment to your personal aspirations:
- Organize your life
- Organize your goals
- Organize your time
Have you tried these organization methods before? What part of your journey are you struggling with? Let me know in the comments below.