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How To Stay Organized: 9 Tips And Tricks
Staying organized has a whole host of benefits. Organized people can benefit from reduced stress, improved sleep, and enhanced productivity and enjoy more free time as a result. The tricky thing in being organized is actually maintaining it.
Not only do you have to build organizational skills, but you have to continually practice these habits in a disorganized world. Below, we’ve gathered a handful of practical tips and tricks to help develop these skills. Try them all if you want, or focus on a few that seem easy and actionable.
No matter how you interpret this list, every one of these tips from Andar can help point you toward an organized lifestyle.
1. Make a To-Do List That’s Practical For Your Style
Making a to-do list might seem like one of the most basic ways to stay organized — because it is. This basic strategy can help you immensely with time management. Having an actionable list of tasks in front of you can help keep you on task for your daily needs. At the end of the day, a to-do list makes it easy to plan tasks for the next day.
Make a list that’s most helpful for your personal style. You can use sticky notes, pen-and-paper, your notes app, or a Google calendar. If you like to stay connected, the lattermost of these can even send you notifications in advance.
You know your working style better than anyone else. Choose a mode for your to-do list that makes it the most accessible for you.
2. Don’t Multitask
For many years, multitasking was a hypothetical way to maximize productivity by splitting your focus. We now know that multitasking is also a huge lie. It’s impossible to devote your full attention to multiple tasks at once, even small tasks. So, don’t try.
Attempting to multitask during your workday or daily routine can result in reduced productivity on other tasks. This isn’t to say that there aren’t times when switching to another task can be beneficial.
For example, when doing laundry or cooking, you may encounter “wait times.” By this, we mean little blocks of time while you’re waiting for passive tasks to finish. By finding other productive tasks to do during this time, you can get more daily chores done in less time. This frees up other blocks of time for you to actually relax.
3. Minimize Your Bags
When traveling, it can be tempting to bulk up, keeping both a backpack and a laptop case, for instance. The ideal daily bag should be large enough for all personal items without being too big.
Many Andar full-grain leather bags, for instance, have multiple compartments. This allows a main compartment for large items like iPads or laptops. Smaller compartments help keep smaller personal items separated. In short, it makes it easier to keep you organized when on the go in your daily life.
4. Clear the Non-Essentials From Your Workspace
We live in a world of conflicting aesthetics, both maximalist and minimalist. For your immediate workspace, pare down the non-essentials. The decor should absolutely reflect your own personal style, but everything you practically need should be in one space.
The same goes for your digital workspace. Sure, the extra few seconds we take looking for a particular app don’t mean much, but when added up over the course of a day, a week, or a year, those little moments matter. It only takes a few minutes to clean up and sort your apps into discrete groups.
Much like an organized bookshelf, a decluttered home page makes navigating to your desired files significantly easier. Filing the non-essentials away can help prioritize your most accessed files.
Organizational Must-Haves
Ditch clunky, oversized bags and wallets in order to better organize your daily goods. When you choose a slim wallet like the Apollo, you reduce clutter to the essentials. This slim, full-grain option comes with a money clip and a quick-pull tab for cards. This allows for quick access to your most important cards, making rifling through your wallet a thing of the past.
Sometimes, we simply can’t just shove everything in a drawer or remove it from our homes entirely. In that case, we want to focus on streamlining our space. Keeping cords organized with something like the Cord Burrito ensures you don’t have to spend time untangling your chargers.
5. Track Due Dates, Rate Priorities Accordingly
Between work, social, and household maintenance activities, our lives pull us in many directions. Some of these are soft deadlines, like cleaning your everyday carries, while others are hard deadlines.
Track these deadlines and gauge time requirements. A short-term task due only slightly before a more intensive task has greater immediacy but less priority.
Ending your evening by planning for the most important tasks ahead can make your next morning easier. You won’t have to worry about running out of time since foresight will help you achieve everything you need.
6. Find Little Unused Pieces of Time During the Day, and Use Them
We only have so many working hours in a day. The amount of time we have small pieces of free time may be surprising. If you live in a metropolitan area where public transit is the norm, for example, you may have time then. Or little bits of time where other work has slowed down or waiting on people or events to begin.
These time blocks are usually fairly small. You could scroll on social media for a few moments but not watch a video or movie. Optimizing and putting these moments towards something productive can give you more time to yourself. Incidentally, this fits in perfectly with our next suggestion.
7. Put Aside Time for Yourself
Staying organized isn’t all about being productive. It’s about making life easier, and an important part of that is taking time for yourself.
Having downtime between bursts of productivity matters, as does keeping life in a work-life balance. Spending time on hobbies and things you love outside work and daily responsibilities shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be something you’re able to do on a regular basis.
Keeping an organized work and home life allows for more time spent doing other things you love. As long as you can keep on top of your regular tasks, this creates a feel-good cycle.
8. Fight Procrastination
Procrastination has many causes, and if this is an issue you struggle with, organizational methods can help counteract it. Procrastination often emerges as a way to either eliminate or reduce stress. By keeping organized with the above tips, you eliminate the worry and stress of starting out.
9. Clear Your Inbox
Your email inbox can build up over time, creating a massive amount of data clutter. The inbox zero approach to clearing an inbox keeps it as organized as a filing cabinet.
Simply sort your emails into to-be-read, archived/important, awaiting a response, to-respond, and deleted categories. This encourages rapid responses to your inbox. It also helps keep your unread emails in the single digits instead of three, four, or even five digits.
Why Stay Organized?
Being organized is something that everyone can benefit from. Who wants the stress of clutter or to waste their own time trying to find things or finish daily tasks?
Being organized requires using the right vessel to facilitate your organization for the future. Whether that be a to-do list, better bags, and containers, or an uncluttered phone is up to you.
Sources:
Health Benefits of Being Organized I Beaumont
You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying I Harvard Business Review
