7 Ways To Be More Organized
How to get your life together, no matter your circumstances
If you just clicked on this rather fascinating listicle, you’re probably experiencing the same problem I have faced time and time again in my twenty years of life. You want to get organized. Again. Organization is something that is always appearing elusive and idealistic in my life.
Even as I write out these suggestions for you I know that sometimes it simply doesn’t work — clutter accumulates, you have a bad week, and your rituals don’t stay intact. But no matter your failure rate or current mental state of disarray, don’t believe that things are hopeless for you.
“Being organized isn’t about getting rid of everything you own or trying to become a different person: it’s about living the way you want to live, but better.”
— Andrew Mellen
It’s never too late to get organized and get your life together, you just have to be willing to try. On that note, here are some of my recommendations:
#1: Schedule everything
I don’t mean this in a hurried, 5-minute increment life sort of way. I mean know how much time you have and what you want to be doing in that time. I’ll drop an image below that gives an example of how I’ve used this tip in my life. Maybe you can even start with scheduling time to organize. That way, you know that you have time to do it and will hopefully follow the directions of your past self and stick to that schedule.
I find that putting everything into my Google Calendar helps me not just remember to do the things that I want to do but to have a birds-eye view of my time and what I want to be investing in.
#2: Batch tasks
I say this all of the time in my self-development writing, but I say it because it really will transform your life if you implement this habit in your day-to-day happenings. Putting tasks together helps to streamline your thought processes and work, making your time management much more effective, and freeing up your mental energy for other things — like the actual work you want to do.
I usually batch tasks by the type of mental state I’ll need to be in to do them. Not only is this the most intuitive to me, but it caters to my ADHD hyperfocus mode very well. This might mean doing all creative tasks together, communication tasks together, or cleaning-related tasks together.
#3: Use the bullet method for your daily logs
While I understand there are some areas of work and means of work that make handwriting difficult, I’ve found that writing down each and everything I need to do helps me stay rather on top of it mentally and productivity-wise. Having to write down each day that I want to try that task makes me consider more deeply, “Do I actually think I can get this done today?”
Using the bullet journaling method helps me be more organized by making me assess what I should actually be doing each day, and by forcing me to really think about it by writing it out. While this might seem slow and inefficient, I believe it helps me keep everything in order and in mind so that I can accomplish what I really need to accomplish each day and scratch out what’s no longer relevant.
#4: Keep a “someday” list
One way that organization in someone’s life can go quickly out the window is when the line between now and later gets a little muddled. It’s easy to start getting things mixed up and out of order, and while it’s great to be thinking about the future, it can be frustrating to not know what things you can act on now and which things you should save for later.
To combat this mental disorganization, I recommend keeping what I crudely call a “someday” list. For instance, right now I have a list of things I want to do in Summer of 2023. There are a few items on there that I’ve already scheduled for different times throughout the coming months, things to prepare for and apply for, but everything else is something that will be best left untouched until around April or May — when I can actually take steps towards different things and trips and such.
#5: Limit the number of apps you use
I am always down to go after and try the next new thing. As soon as I heard about Evernote, Notion, and Notability, I was off to the AppStore to download the next big program that was going to change my life. Unfortunately, my life simply can’t accommodate all of these apps, and I was forced to cut down.
Now, while I acknowledge the features I lost without Evernote, Notability, and other similar apps, I’m really satisfied with what Notion is able to do for me right now — and I’m making it work for what I need it to work for. This helps me to be a lot more organized and on top of things, not having to switch from app to app to find what I need.
#6: Label things intuitively
I know, I know — maybe this is something you’ve already thought of and tried. Whether this is something you’re used to or not, to get more organized I would implore you to label things in a way that makes sense. Put similar things together and label things the way you’ll understand them.
Last summer I was tasked with organizing my church’s appropriately named “junky room”. Ultimately, I was able to successfully organize it by using a “label to label” system where I would label a box/bin with a word and then also label its place on the shelf with that same word. That way, whenever someone took down the “Christmas” box or the “Sports equipment” box, they knew exactly the location that box was supposed to go when they got done with it.
While you don’t have to label everything, it might not be a bad idea — and if you are into putting words on your storage containers, do it in a way that makes sense and is the most useful to you and all of the people you live or work with to maintain the highest level of organization and effectiveness.
#7: Find a home for all of your physical documents
If you’re like me, you live between a physical and a digital world. So much of your life lives in the cloud and on Google Docs, but so many physical documents still float around in various folders, notebooks, and bins sitting under your desk.
To combat this way of accumulating clutter, I’ve aimed to find a home for all of my physical documents. For those I haven’t dealt with, I have a singular container that sits under my desk, and after a while, I do a purge and throw most of it away. For the things I do get to, I either scan them and throw them away, put them in my life binder for all of my documents that I keep together like scans of my birth certificate and important receipts, or put them in my safe.
This helps me keep up with what I need to keep up with, make important papers easily accessible, and get rid of the papers I simply don’t need anymore.
Being organized is all about creating a structure and a framework that works for you, whether that means organizing tasks or the physical documents that lie around your home or office. And while you might be thinking otherwise, getting organized isn’t an impossible task, it just takes some time, inspiration, and a little bit of an idea of what you’re doing.
I hope that this list of ideas for getting organized has been helpful to you. Best of luck, and have a great day!
