The Comprehensive Guide of How to Stay Organized
Despite our best attempts at managing our time, it often feels like the day has slipped us by. Tasks get pushed to after lunch, then to tomorrow, and so on. We try keeping it straight in our heads but it inevitably spills over once there’s too much to remember at once. We turn to a digital calendar, sticky notes, a paper planner- anything we can think of to keep us on track.
Does the secret lie in waking up at 5am like those YouTube videos detailing the morning routines of famous entrepreneurs? Or maybe a color-coded bullet journal filled to the brim with habit trackers? How do the people who seem to have it all together, well, keep it together?
I’ll say it now- there is no secret. You don’t need to wake up at 4am on a dark Monday morning before the sun has risen, and you don’t need a fancy planner or moleskin notebook either. You simply need to utilize the right tools to manage your time.
Without further ado, here are 9 ways to keep your life organized and on-track.
1. Time Batching
Time batching, to put it simply, is a time management technique that involves grouping together similar tasks and completing the whole ‘batch’ at the same time. The idea is that once you get into the flow of the process for a particular activity, you’ll be able to churn through more of the same type of activity faster if it’s done one after the other. You’re already in the proper mindset and you have all the right tools prepared to take on the activity.
For example, say you need to record a few videos every week. You plan to space it out for yourself by recording on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each day you take out your mic, your camera, set up all of your equipment, etc. You need to remind yourself where you left off and what you plan to do for each recording. It takes a few minutes to boot everything up and get ready before you’re ready to go. Then at the end, unless you have a dedicated space to keep your recording equipment, you shut down and put everything away.
Now wouldn’t it be simpler if you recorded all three videos in one sitting? If you pick a day where you have a larger chunk of time, lets say Wednesday- you only need to set up and clean up once. Not only do you save time with the equipment, but it takes you less time to get back into the flow of recording videos. You don’t need to ease back into the process each time because you’re already in the flow.
Time batching also allows you to minimize the amount of time you spend distracted by miscellaneous tasks. The time you allot to an activity is solely to do that one thing- you don’t use that time to go check emails, take the dog for a walk, or call up your grandparents. That chunk of time you’ve carved out has a clear goal, so you don’t need to waste time thinking about what it is you’re going to be working on.
2. Catering to Biological Prime-Time
When we think about getting work done, especially those of us in the corporate world, we tend to think of the typical 9-5 schedule. We expect to take our lunch somewhere between 11 and 1, in the middle of our day. But while this may be the standard, it might not be the best arrangement for you.
Of course, not everyone has a lot of flexibility to move around their schedule. A freelance blogger will be able to arrange their time more than someone expected to be in the office with set times for client meetings. But I believe some of these tips will be applicable to everyone.
Firstly, lunch. Provided you work full-time, you have a mandated work break for either a half-hour or hour in the middle of your day. While some places do have mandated lunch hours, most do allow you some degree of flexibility in choosing when you take your break. Instead of defaulting to your usual lunch at the midway point, take your lunch when you have the least amount of energy. If you’re already in the flow of things, there’s no reason to break it just because it’s an arbitrary point to go to lunch.
Instead, take your break at the time where you normally feel the biggest slump. Use your lunch as a refueling point when you’re low on gas instead of at half-tank.
Your general working hours matter too. Being allowed to come in early or start later depends where you work, but you can at least choose what to do and when. If you’re a morning person, schedule your hardest tasks in the morning then save meetings and checking emails for the afternoon. Find yourself losing focus around 3pm? Save your easier tasks for then or schedule a break to recharge. While the number of tasks we have to do won’t change, the speed and focus we can devote to them can be tailored based on knowing your body.
3. Eat your Frogs
Not literally, of course. A frog is the task that you least want to do or the hardest task to do. It’s the email you’ve been putting off sending, or the project you can’t seem to get started on.
Why focus on your frogs? Getting the most difficult task of the day done early on means you will save yourself the anxiety and stress that comes with dreading doing it. With only the relatively easier or more enjoyable tasks lefts, you have more to look forward to. By having less weighing over you you can boost your mood, and in turn, your productivity levels. You no longer need to procrastinate on eating those pesky frogs, and instead can focus on the next thing on your to-do list with a not as full plate.
But also know when not to start the day off getting past your most difficult task. If the frog happens to be particularly draining, particularly if you believe it will affect your mood and energy levels for the rest of the day, then save it for the end of the day instead. The key here is to know yourself; is getting this task out of the way first going to feel like relief, or will it leave you drained from having to deal with it? Ask yourself this question and decide what part of the day makes the most sense for you. Just don’t let yourself push it off again!
4. Using Pomodoro the Right Way
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Pomodoro method- you set a timer for 25 minutes of working followed by a 5 minute break. Rinse and repeat.
However, on average it takes between 10-15 minutes to achieve a state of flow, or a state of being completely immersed in whatever it is you are doing. If you’re stopping to take a break every 25 minutes, then you might only only get 15 minutes of that time actually immersed in what you’re doing.
Instead of constantly breaking your train of thought to go take a break, try extending the amount of time in between breaks. People have reported that 45-55 minutes between breaks worked much better for them than the stated 25 thanks to a longer uninterrupted work time. And consider not measuring by time; if your work revolves around small, constant tasks, then finishing x amount of tasks before you take a break might make more sense for you. As always, the key is knowing the ideal timing for you rather than following the exact time laid out by the method.
5. Use the Agile Methodology
Those of you working in a corporate environment, particular software, may already be familiar with Agile. Agile is a mentality applied to how teams deliver products to clients.
The standard “Waterfall” methodology has been to have a project, like a new app, go team by team until its done. First, the client outlines everything the app should have. Then the product managers outline it before sending it off to the coding team. Then it passes on to writers to document the app, and then to the marketing team, and etc. This is a highly simplified depiction of the process, but what matters is that the project was worked on by a single team at a time and is not released to the client until all parts of the app have been completed.
Under the Agile methodology, all of these teams would get started at about the same time with the goal of having a working prototype in just two weeks (also called a sprint). The app might be far from the end-product the client wants, but what matters is that you end up with a working product right away. It’s also important that all of the teams involved communicate daily about their progress via Scrum meetings, a daily meeting where each team briefly comments on their current progress on their deliverables.
While Agile is predominantly used in multi-faceted business projects, the same principles can also be applied to your everyday tasks. Instead of trying to complete all aspects of a project fully, try and just get to a tangible product first. For example, if you want to start a blog using Agile, you might plan to just create a functioning empty site first. Then you would focus on a couple tasks at a time such as adding a home and about page, then later adding articles one by one. In the Waterfall methodology, the site wouldn’t have been launched until all of the pages on the site have been added.
Using Agile, you prioritize creating a concrete, working prototype of the finished product much faster than you would otherwise. This allows you to visually see your progress- trying to complete projects via Waterfall can feel discouraging at times when the final product feels so far off from completion. That initial bare-bones version might be incomplete, but it can go a long way in making you feel like your project is moving forward, especially since you can see the product evolving at the end of every Agile sprint.
6. Urgency-Importance Matrix
The Urgent Important Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix, helps us strike a balance between urgent tasks versus important tasks (as they don’t always overlap). People are biased towards completing time-sensitive tasks even when they would gain more value from the non-urgent but important task. This tendency is dubbed the “Mere-Urgency Effect”, and the best way to avoid it is to chart out your tasks using this matrix.
Urgent and Important: Anything in this quadrant should be your top-priority and completed right-away.
Important but not Urgent: These tasks should be saved for later and scheduled once the urgent and important tasks are done.
Urgent but not Important: Tasks that are time-sensitive, but not important. These should be delegated if possible.
Neither Important or Urgent: If the task isn’t important or urgent, remove it from your to-do list.
7. Daily Highlight
Do you ever find yourself creating a mile-long to-do list each day but never getting through it? Then consider the daily highlight- prioritizing one single task that must be done each day. This productivity method focuses on the belief that if you complete the single most important thing you have to do each day, then your year won’t be wasted because you’ll have spent 365 days accomplishing the most important thing you could have that day.
Let’s say you would like to clean the kitchen and go for a walk, but you know that it would also really help you out if you took care of getting an oil change today. If you end up unable to do the cleaning or go out for the walk but you are able to get the oil change done, then you’ve accomplished your daily highlight and don’t need to feel bad about not having time for the other two tasks. Having accomplished that one task you deemed most important allows you to feel less guilt about ending the day without having crossed off every item on your to-do list.
As long as you prioritize completing your daily highlight each day, you know you’re on the right track even if less important tasks slip by.
8. Streaks
Streaks, also called chaining, is the idea of marking each consecutive day to complete a specific task. If, for example, you want to practice piano with the streak method, you would use an app or a mark an x on a physical calendar for each day in a row you managed to practice. You can also set other rules like that the practice only counts towards your streak if you practice for at least 30 minutes or if you spend time on scales. But the key is that you need to practice everyday or else the streak will break and you’ll have to start over.
As the chain of days in a row gets longer, the more motivation you’ll feel to keep it going. Seeing a 200 day streak could motivate you to put in that piano practice even if you aren’t feeling it just to not break your ever increasingly impressive streak.
On the other hand, the chain of days won’t feel as motivating to uphold early on. A week-long streak feels easy to get back to if you want to skip a day. For that reason, streaks are best reserved for long-term endeavors that require consistency. Activities like practicing an instrument, working on a blog, or practicing a foreign language are all great examples of activities that are better suited to using streaks with.
9. Habit Tracking
Habit tracking is like streaks that don’t need to be connected. Instead of caring about the number of days in a row you worked on something, habit tracking is about how many days you did work on it versus didn’t.
The most common version of the habit tracker has a square for each day of the week that you mark if you completed the task. As the name implies, the essence of habit tracking revolves around tracking activities and holding yourself accountable so that these activities become habits. Common examples include drinking enough water each day, exercising for 30 minutes, and writing morning pages or three things you’re grateful for.
Getting a new habit to stick takes consistent effort, and habit tracking keeps you on track by presenting you a visual of how consistent you’ve been at it. Unlike with streaks, a habit tracker doesn’t restart your progress if you miss a day. Instead, the act of marking whether you accomplished an activity that day reinforces and reminds you that the activity is something you’re supposed to be doing.
Managing our time effectively and staying organized can be tough when work and home blend together, but I hope these time-management tips will help you stay focused.
Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions for techniques you’d like to see in more depth!
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