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A few years ago, personal branding expert Dorie Clark was a guest on the Fast Company podcast that I host called The New Way We Work. She had me do an exercise asking people from different aspects of my life to describe me in three words. I asked a coworker, my mom, and a friend. Some of their answers varied (my mom’s “tells it like it is” is my favorite), but all three people used one word in common: organized.
While I may have wished that I was universally seen as “a visionary” or “creative,” being organized has served me well in both work and life. Everyone might know that it’s generally good to be organized, but organization is more than just having a clean desk (which I don’t) or a color-coded calendar (which I do).
Here are a few aspects of life and work and how you can approach making them more organized:
Making the best to-do list
There are many different ways to approach to-do lists, but the best is the method that helps you accomplish the most. One approach is to batch your tasks together. Robert Pozen, author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, says he divides his lists into three sections. The first section lists out events, meetings, and calls for the day. The second lists what he hopes to get done during those appointments, and the third lists out his to-dos that don’t fit. This includes items that need to be done but don’t have a slot in his calendar. These are tasks he works on during the in-between times throughout the day.
Another similar approach to organize your to-do list is to batch similar tasks together. This can work well to keep you focused and put your high-mental-energy tasks together at a time when you can best concentrate (and not during the 3 p.m. afternoon slump).
Types of clutter and how to manage them
According to Barbara Hemphill, author of Less Clutter More Life, there are four types of clutter that can derail our success: Physical, Digital, Emotional, and Spiritual.
“Physical and digital clutter are symptoms of emotional and spiritual clutter,” Hemphill says. Through her work as a professional organizer, she saw clients with hoarding problems who were actually holding on to items for emotional reasons. “It wasn’t a paper problem; it was an emotional problem,” she says.
Spiritual clutter, she says also gets in the way, by representing our hopes, dreams, and fears. “We are to not only accomplish our work, but we are to enjoy our life. When you know your purpose, then it’s easy to know what’s clutter.”
Hemphill suggests asking yourself the question, “Does this [physical or digital thing] help me accomplish my work or have the life I want? If it doesn’t,” she says, “by definition, it’s clutter. Clutter prevents you from reaching your purpose—but getting rid of clutter helps you reveal your purpose.”
Other organizational methods
Time-block your day: Similar to organizing your to-do list into blocks, organizing your day through time blocks (instead of to-dos) can help by giving you more disciplined focused time.
Color-code tasks, events, and files: There are plenty of software programs, including Trello and Airtable, that offer lots of features to sort and categorize. But even without specialized software, a little color goes a long way for visual organization. My calendar has one color for work, one for family, and one for my personal appointments, as well as lesser-used colors like staff vacations, holidays, and news events. It’s easy to turn them on and off to see as much or as little as I need to. I also use different colors for expenses in my budget, and for different colleagues’ ideas in note-taking documents.
If all this feels overwhelming, start with one area first and build from there.
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