Get organised in life
On my website, and in many of my social media posts, I talk about the “mental clutter cloud”, What do I mean exactly? Well, mental clutter makes our mind full, and consists of thoughts about things we need or want to do, or places we need to be, that either hang around in our minds at what we might consider an inconvenient time, or pop into our minds distracting us from other things. Are you with me yet?
It might help if I describe a situation. You sit down at your desk ready to start your working day. An e-mail drops into your inbox, you see the notification pop up, so you click on it. It's a reminder about a work dinner next week.
Thoughts: “Okay this e-mail says I need to reply by tomorrow. Okay I will do that I need to cheque that my husband can take child #1 to football And drag child number 2 along as well. I will check with him later”
So you then just leave that email there.
Thoughts: “That reminds me, I said that I would book a table for getting together with my friends next week, I will call that restaurant now, Oh no – that place isn’t open yet, I'll do that later”
Ok – back to work stuff. You start to think about what you need to do that day but there is so much on your list you can’t even begin to know how to prioritise tasks. Just then, the school WhatsApp group pings – it’s a message from a helpful parent to say not to forget that the children have a spelling test tomorrow
Thoughts: “I really need to remember to practice spellings with Child #2 tonight, I will put it on my list”", at which point you add it to a post it note and don’t look at it again until you find it the week after under a pile of stuff.
So back to work… but you have a meeting now, and still haven’t done anything, but your brain been bounced around a dozen topics already that day, it feels like you just keep procrastinating at work, you kind of are!
Thoughts: Argh! “how can I focus on one thing?!”
Is this sounding familiar?
In my view, we can never completely stop this from ever happening, but we can absolutely take steps to bring it under control.
The first step is to establish systems in your life. I’m going to talk about life systems in a blog post later this week, but broadly speaking I mean things like having a single calendar that everyone in your household uses and most importantly – regularly checking and reviewing that calendar as a HABIT, that’s the life changing part.
Another example of a life system would be having a specific place where you keep things in your house with everyone knowing that is the home for that thing and people in the household being in the habit of putting things back there. An example would be, instead of the kids PE kit going In their wardrobes upstairs, I have a PE kit station downstairs near the washing machines. There is a basket at this station with clean games kit for each child and their games kit bags also live there. So when they need to pack their bags they know where to go. When anyone is sorting clean washing, they know that it goes there; that's a life system.
There are soo many life systems it would be impossible to list them all here. Also, life systems are unique. They are unique to each person and each home. They must work for you. And they work alongside business systems or systems you use to manage your work.
When I work with women one-to-one, this is what I mainly work with them on; implementing systems to help them get more of the right stuff done - in work and in life. I share load of tips over on Instagram on how to get organised at work, and how to be more organised in life plus loads more!
