Five Habits You Must Form to Stay Organized
They will save your time, attention, and energy
Actually, there is no “must.” You don’t have to develop and follow habits to stay organized. It’s just 1,000 times wiser and less costly to do so.
You don’t need to go to the pastry shop to buy bread. You can delegate it to someone and pay them $1,000 per loaf.
This illustrates the difference between having and not having habits. Habits take care of things in the background mode. They spare your time, attention, and energy.
A few habits that come to my mind when I’m thinking about staying organized:
1. Set priorities.
Well, this is needed to stay effective. But if you aren’t effective, no matter how organized you are, the number of to-do items will overwhelm you.
You need to work on things that matter. You need to work on projects according to schedule and specific order. You don’t create an outline for a book after you wrote it.
You need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in your daily schedule.
2. Write things down.
No one can be organized by keeping things in their head. Well, no one with a normal life with work and family responsibilities. This is step #1.
When you write something down, you can manage it - delegate put it into your calendar, determine the right sequence and circumstances to finish the thing successfully, break it down, and whatever else. But if you keep things in your head, those to-do items just bounce around and add chaos to your life.
3. Break things down.
We can get easily overwhelmed with the plethora of things to manage in our life. Breaking tasks and projects into smaller pieces fights this off.
It is a huge challenge to write and publish a book. But writing a paragraph? That’s not the big deal, isn’t it? You can do a lot more by being granular with what you want to accomplish.
4. Set the next step.
Another layer to your organizing skill is determining the next step for the specific project/ task.
When you break a project down into smaller parts, its sequence is usually self-evident. When you set the next step when you finish some part you spare yourself loads of mental efforts when you go back to the task.
5. Keep an order.
There was some behavioral research done concluding that a mess on your desk or in your office has a huge distractive potential. The fewer items around you and the more they are in their place, the better you can subconsciously focus.
It applies to the mental environment too. If you get plenty of notifications from social media or from your email, you are bombarded with distractions.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
Originally published on Quora.
