Despite the popular belief that some people are just born organized, the truth is that anyone, if they put enough effort into it by cultivating healthy habits, can get organized. If you are reading is, the probability is that you consider yourself a disorganized person. Since most of us are stuck at home these days, I can’t think of a better time to work on our organization skills and our habits, as well as try to learn something new as well as better ourselves.
Don’t Rely Too Much on Your Brain to Store Information
Organized people don’t rely too much on their memory, since they understand that our memory tends to be very fallible, memories fade, especially if we don’t often come back to them. So considering this, if you want to remember something, try creating a habit of writing it down in a system that you trust (and no, this doesn’t mean a high-security digital diary). What separates a system in which you can and one in which you can’t trust, you might ask? First, and maybe the most important is that this system will not lose your data. So this probably rules out random notes that will end up getting scattered all over your home.
What you will use depends on the nature of the information you want to remember. If we are talking about important dates or appointments, it is a great idea to have a calendar where you can store this kind of information. You can find calendars that are practically whiteboards with dates, and this can help even more with managing what do you write on it. Considering that many of us choose to stay at home, you can alternatively even print your own calendars for free in the format that you like the most, so you can check out these calendar resources for that. And if we are talking about things like phone numbers, ideas, etc. having a notebook that you can use for this purpose that you are sure that you will not lose, it is a pretty good idea. You can find any notebook that you like practically everywhere.
Label All Things
Secondly, organized people tend to label things, especially the things that they don’t use all the time. For example, you have a set of, maybe hardware, or papers with some information that you really don’t use quite that much, so you store them someplace safe, right? What are the odds that you will be 100% sure what even are those after a couple of months? If you label the packaging where you have stored these, you are avoiding to forget what are they and why have you stored them in the first place.
Building a Mindfulness Loop
While this sounds like quite a mouthful, it is actually pretty simple. It consists of building a sort of mental check system, where you train yourself to have important dependencies going through your head in a repeatable pattern, let’s say, once a day or once a week, so that you will be able to check upon them. And about dependencies, they can be anything ranging from throwing out your garbage to having a regular visitation to the dentists, it really depends on what kind of responsibilities do you have. It does take a certain amount of practice in order to achieve this, but once you do, it can help you with something that is maybe the biggest difference between organized and disorganized people – you won’t constantly let life catch you off guard.
Have a Backup
Having a backup for anything that you use on a regular basis maybe seems like a not all that important tip, but I guarantee you – you will save a whole lot of time and frustration if you adopt this habit. Especially if you, for instance, run out of something that you need for your work and hence need it now. So, try to remember – two is one, and one is none.
Organize by Experience
I have saved this tip for the end because, in order to have experience keeping everything organized, you should probably have some tips under your sleeve from which you can learn further. This basically means that the way you organize your life can vary so much from the way that another person does it. So you shouldn’t organize by dogma, by how other people tell you, because all our lives are different and hence are the way that we express ourselves, and manage our lives.
Be sure to try and use these tips, because, in the worst-case scenario, you are going to learn something new about yourself and your habits.