Best No-Nonsense Ways to Organize Your Time and Space
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Once you’ve finished reading, you’ll be well on your way to getting your life and time together. The more you work on decluttering your life, the easier it will be.
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Know How to Organize
Believe it or not, no one is born organized. Every person has to go through the process of learning the right ways to be organized, and how they can create healthy habits so they can continually be organized.
The first step in getting your life & sh*t together is to know exactly how to organize.
Organizing is actually a lot more simple than some people make it out to be.
The most important steps to organize a space is to:
Assign a home.
How often do you have random items scattered across your desk and under your bed? Trust me – finding a dirty, old & smelly sock under your bed isn’t the start to a great day.
A simple way to fix this cluttering problem is to simply assign a home to all of your belongings.
If you don’t have space for something, do you really need it?
By assigning a home, it helps to keep everything organized, faster to find, and decluttered.
Use separators & storage bins.
Using separators is so amazing is because they organize AND add style to your home.
You can use them for anything and store extra for later use. It’s kind of like your dad’s old toolbox. You don’t need it to be happy, but it is extremely useful when you have it.
Acrylic dividers can be used to organize your books, declutter your closet, and even store your vegetables in the fridge! They are a must-muti-use tool for everyone’s home.
My personal favorite is these acrylic shelf dividers.
Label everything.
Of course – label your items, not people.
Labeling all of your items not only looks aesthetically pleasing, but it also helps with the organization process.
If you are using any type of darker or non-see-through bin, labels help you to continually store items in the correct place.
Even if you have the acrylic bins and shelf dividers shown above, they can be useful if you ever need to know exactly where you’re putting items. This can be really important for when you’re first starting to get organized.
It can be really difficult to remember where all of your items are when you’re first starting to keep your space more organized. I believe getting a label maker can make this new organizational process a million times easier, and encourage you to continue being organized.
A great Label Maker from Amazon.
Create a Beautiful Environment
I’d say that it’s almost common knowledge that beautifying our spaces increases our mood – which in turn directly increases our productivity.
The most important step in creating a beautiful environment is to create a well-intentioned environment. If someone were to redesign my office to be aesthetically pleasing, I would like it – but I wouldn’t love it.
The reason why I love my office is because I decorated my office – with the intention – to represent myself & my goals.
If someone else were to look at my office – they may not even like the appearance of it. But because I designed it myself and bought objects that reflected the person I want to be, I associate my office with happy feelings every time I’m working.
Here are some cute & useful items from Amazon to take your office to the next level:
Use a Planner
I know, I know! Literally, everyone says to use a planner.
But, if you’re serious about getting your life organized – you NEED a planner.
Planners help a lot when it comes to prioritizing your best work. A lot of us are using up a lot of our time doing non-essential tasks.
I can personally say – when I started using a planner, I freed up HOURS of time every.single.day. Using a planner helped me to see what I was actually spending a lot of my time doing. Usually, it was watching Netflix or trying to figure out what I should be doing next.
There are so many things and ways you can use a planner – here are a few examples of things I personally use mine for.
Building a routine.
When I first got a planner, I had no idea what I was doing or what I was supposed to be writing down. So naturally, I just started writing down what I was doing and when.
After a few days of this, I realized how disorganized my life really was.
That’s when I decided that building a routine for myself would be very helpful. I then created a routine that was completely unrealistic and unattainable.
Thankfully, because I was keeping track of how my routine was going and what I was doing during the day in my planner – I didn’t give up.
Instead, I created a routine that was easier for me to accomplish, and more realistic for what I’m physically and mentally able to do in a day.
Now after a few months of tweaking my routine to suit my needs – I can happily say that I’m accomplishing more in a single month than I was in a year.
Use time blocking.
Another useful thing I was able to do in my journal was to block out my time.
After creating my routine, I knew what I wanted to accomplish in a day, but I always seemed to be running out of time or wasting time in between tasks.
The simple fix was to use time-blocking.
This way, I was much more in control of my time and how I used it. This in turn, also helped me to prioritize my tasks.
By setting out exactly what you’re going to be doing and when, you’re better able to get rid of time wasters.
Tracking your sleep.
Too many people get too little of sleep. Myself included.
There are so many things wrong with not getting enough sleep – should I even have to explain why?
Sleep does a lot of things like – keeping you alive, allowing you to complete daily tasks, and being good for your health.
If you struggle with insomnia or to get enough hours during the day, I suggest you get a journal and start tracking it asap.
If you don’t use a journal and would like a better way of tracking your sleep, I suggest using a smartwatch from Apple. This one’s from Amazon.
Brain dumping.
Honestly, nothing feels better than to get a huge brainstorming session out of your mind and onto paper.
Besides how it makes you feel, brainstorming helps your creativity and encourages problem-solving and innovative ideas.
It can also be super satisfying to create an aesthetic mind map of your brain dump if you have any extra free time.
I make sure to brain dump once or twice a week in my journal.
Know How to Set Good Goals
A big part of organizing your life is also understanding why you want to organize your life.
To be happy, to feel good, or to make things easier for yourself?
The reason it’s so important to know the why is so you can create good goals for yourself going forward.
Basically, you need to be setting SMART goals.
S – Specific
Specific – Your goals should be clear and specific. Add as much detail as you can but try to make it concise. There’s no need to write an entire paragraph every time you want to make a goal for yourself!
M – Measurable
Measurable – Define exactly what progress you’re making and how to do so. What are the smaller tasks you need to complete to achieve your goal?
A – Attainable
Attainable – Is it even possible? Maybe it’s possible – but it’s not realistic. It’s very important that you set goals that are realistic for you personally.
R – Relevant
Relevant – Are the goals you’re setting realistic and relevant for you? Or are you spending your time doing arbitrary things that don’t provide any value? Make sure your goals are relevant and purposeful to you.
T – Time Bound
Time Bound – When do you need to accomplish the task? Make sure it’s realistic and adjust if needed.
Personal Tips:
Because of faulty evolution – we humans majorly suck at planning and preparing for the future.
This is why you need to be creating a long-term vision instead of long-term goals.
Long-Term Goal to Long-Term Vision:
I’m going to speak Spanish in 1 year 🢡 In the future, I’ll be able to speak Spanish fluently.
By creating long-term visions, you avoid the trap of feeling overwhelmed and dreading the amount of time it will take to accomplish something.
I’ve personally quit many long-term goals because, at the time, they just seemed to be impossible and unrealistic.
You also should be using short-term goals instead of short-term visions.
Short-Term Vision to Short-Term Goal:
Sometime this week, I’ll research how to start learning Spanish 🢡 On Monday, I will research how to learn Spanish and plan out an entire month of Spanish-related activities.
By creating short-term goals, you force yourself to know what you’re doing and when rather than ‘just going with the flow’ and hoping you’ll muster enough motivation to accomplish something.
The Right Way:
Long-Term Vision: In the future, I’ll be able to speak Spanish fluently.
Short-Term Goal: On Monday, I will research how to learn Spanish and plan out an entire month of Spanish-related activities.
Self-Care Actually Matters
Self-care is doing anything that improves your mental, physical, or emotional health. It is also very important to include self-care activities daily.
How often do you actually plan specifically for self-care or relaxing activities for yourself?
I used to plan out my entire day – but when it came to my free time I’d just watch TV or think about everything I needed to do the next day.
I would always put my emotional and mental health off so I wouldn’t have to actually ‘deal’ with anything.
For the longest time, I thought that by putting off any of my emotions or my wants, I was being more productive.
In reality, this just led me to feel constantly burnt out and hurt the quality of my work.
As with anything in life, self-care is a balancing act. Too much self-care and you’re not being as productive as you could be, and too little self-care, and you’re harming your health and productivity.
Make a Self-Care Routine
An important aspect of self-care is to actually set aside time or activities for you to do – daily.
The great thing about self-care is the fact that it doesn’t have to be anything extravagant or well-planned out. For me, I have tea every day once I’ve finished my household chores. This is one of the ways I show myself appreciation for doing just the basic stuff.
Take Care of Your Hygiene
Not only does having good hygiene make you feel better mentally and emotionally, but it also reduces the spread of illnesses and decreases your risk for medical conditions.
In fact, most would argue good hygiene is a basic human right – I sure as hell would.
I take care of my hygiene by making myself feel good, look good, and smell great.
Here are some great products from Amazon if you’re looking to look, feel, and smell good.
Affirmations or Nah…?
If you’re unsure, affirmations are positive statements that help you to overcome negative thoughts.
Some individuals are very into affirmations and others – not so much.
But if you’re someone who is looking for a good way to destress and improve your thinking to be more positive, I suggest you spend some time researching and using affirmations.
If you’re wanting to look more into affirmations, I suggest checking out this article from healthline.
Take Care of Your Money
Having good personal finance is a skill that every single person will have to learn to have a successful and fulfilling life. Although this is a basic fact, schools still don’t teach personal finance skills to students.
Because of this, you should spend some time really getting to know how you should use your money, where it should go, and how you can use it to make even more money.
To make sure you’re taking proper care of your money, I suggest you do a few things.
Read this article by me, seriously.
The Smartest Money Goals to Achieve in 2022
Immerse Yourself
There are thousands of resources to get yourself started with taking care of your money.
Personally, taking care of my finances allowed me to quit my job and start working entirely freelance. GOOD JOB ME :)!
What’s even more amazing, is that you can too!
If you’re looking for a really basic and easy way to solidify your finance knowledge, I suggest watching this free Udemy course.
If you’re already somewhat knowledgeable, I suggest these great books from Amazon.
Budgeting Planners
If you’re not already using one, budgeting planners should be on your ‘must-haves’ list.
Budgeting planners are so great because they allow you to see where you’re overspending as well as fix your bad spending habits.
Also, I find them SUPER pretty and satisfying. Like, look at this one.
Additional Income Streams
Do you know when you’ll be fired from your job?
Do you know if you will be fired from your job?
More than likely if you answered yes to both of these, you’re a bad worker.
All jokes aside – you can never know when something will happen to your main income stream.
You also don’t know when or if an unexpected tragedy will strike and you’ll be left scraping by with only pennies left each month.
For my family, this was a reality when I was a measly 8 years old.
My sister had a pre-cancerous brain tumor that had been wreaking havoc in her life for many months. My family was already struggling to make their monthly payments, and this just made the situation much worse.
While I don’t blame my parents, and my sister is alive and well – it taught me a very important lesson.
Never assume that your money is safe – and always have a backup plan. Always have another source of income just in case something like this were to happen to you or your family.
Make Your Life Easier
People who have well-organized lives all understand they need to keep things simple.
There are a lot of things you can do that will make keeping everything organized so much easier.
Plan the day before.
If you’re anything like me, having to do basically anything but exist in the morning is a chore.
A way that I make sure I’m productive as soon as I get up is to plan everything I need to do the day before.
For example, the night before I wash dishes, pick out my clothes, set out everything I need for my tea, and put out my needed electronics.
This way, when I do wake up, I don’t run into any issues getting ready. This also allows me to write in my journal – which I enjoy doing, so I have no problem starting off the day productively.
I honestly think that if you truly want to start every day productively, then you should plan the day before.
Automate sh*t.
If you can, you should create ‘systems’ to organize when, how, and the amount of time for your different tasks.
Basically, create detailed plans and steps to make it easier to accomplish your tasks.
For me, this personally looks like a decluttering system, cleaning, and reading schedule.
By having all of these planned out, it makes it easy to get started on the task because I know what I need to do, when, and how long to do it for.
If you can, plan out important but tedious tasks to make them easier to accomplish.
Meal prep.
When first starting out, meal prepping can be a pain in the arse.
Especially because you don’t know what to make, how much, or anything really.
But – if you are spending a lot of time working or studying, prepping your meals will be a massive life & time-saver.
Meal prepping is so useful because it can encourage you to eat healthily, and save you time during the week.
After a long day, the last thing I want to do is make dinner and spend my precious time worrying about what I should be making for dinner.
Organize the Nitty Gritty Sh*t
One of the key things to being an organized individual is to have your nitty-gritty sh*t organized. I can’t even tell you how frustrating it is when you finish all of your to-dos, only to realize that the thing you’ve been putting off now has to be done.
The nitty-gritty is simply anything that you always put off for later or forget about in general. Realistically, we all want to be the person who actually cleans behind their toilet – but not all of us can be great like that lol.
Is it possible to love something so much that you salivate at the thought of it? –I’m sorry, that sentence sounded much better in my brain. 😬
Anyways, if you’re someone who is relying on pure brainpower to store your passwords, there is a much better way to do it.
I use LastPass, the perfect password management system.
I’m not sure if you can tell – but I REALLY like it.
What’s great about it is that it keeps all of your passwords in one place where you can access all of them and get a score on how secure they are. They’re also very secure when it comes to storing your information and keeping it private – so there’s no need to hesitate on that portion.
I am always hesitant to keep my passwords in a journal in case I lose it – or my house were to catch fire or something. I know that’s not very likely – but you always need to be prepared.
Seriously, if you aren’t storing your passwords anywhere – use LastPass!
Backup everything.
What would happen if your phone, house, and computer were to burst into flames? Would you be screwed?
Probably.
If you use your computers or even your cupboard for storing important and vital information – back it up.
It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Know Where You’re Spending Your Time
It’s important that you spend your time properly. Having good time management skills allow you to get more done and prioritize your time. This brings us to our first point:
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.
What are you spending most of your time doing? Are you being productive or just doing busywork?
When it comes to organizing your life, the MOST important step is to know what you need to be spending your time on.
If you spend countless hours cleaning your house every day, there comes a point where you’re not being productive anymore and just wasting your time.
We are given one life, one life to do 10 lifetimes’ worth of work, so make it count!
Social media rot.
If you’re someone who wakes up and scrolls through their Pinterest, Facebook, or YouTube feed – you should stop.
Don’t think this is me shaming you – it’s actually because too much social media use is bad for you.
If you use social media too much, it encourages a negative self-view and increases feelings of inadequacy.
In turn, all of these things make you feel depressed, anxious, and inadequate.
Social Media is not inherently a bad thing, but too much of it is.
Keeping up with the news?
I don’t know how often I hear people tell me how much they hate the political atmosphere here in the US, but they don’t even attempt to make things better.
I understand that it’s a lot easier to be a complainer than a doer, but you should go with the latter.
Although this doesn’t personally do anything to organize your or other’s life, if we all were to try and spend our time helping others – believe it or not – things would be much better here in the US.
If you’re interested, stay invested in the news and keep learning about ways you can contribute to a better society.
Continually learning.
A lot of people think that the end of their ‘learning career’ is when they finish college or are working in their first job.
You should still continue your education because of the many benefits it has. Not only do you become a better and more educated member of society, but it also increases your confidence.
Lifelong learning helps you to adapt to any necessary changes you’re forced into. Would you be able to switch careers today if you had to?
I personally love to learn things – like it’s just magnificent how the world and its systems work. It’s crazy to think how vast the universe is and how everything is so closely intertwined.
I just think this earth is so fascinating.
Sorry – I’ll stop nerding out on you.
Seriously, buy a planner already.
You need a planner or a system to actually keep your life together.
If you’re serious about managing your time and life – you need to consider the benefits of a planner.
If you skipped it before – go read the ‘Use a Planner’ section up above! It is sooo important for organization.
Conclusion
Honestly, if you finished reading this article – good freaking job to you.
I’m glad that you’re taking an interest in bettering yourself. I really hope that this list will help you in all of your future endeavors.
Basically, the most important thing to organizing your life and time, is to know how, what, and when you should be organizing.
If you’re interested – I offer a free Get Your Sh*t Together printable if you’re wanting. This was basically created to be an easy list of things you can do to get your sh*t together in a single day.
