Does your life seem like a chaotic mess at times? It’s time you learn how to organize your life. Here are 11 helpful tips.
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1. Create one folder for important documents divided by subjects
Bank statements, insurance contracts, login details – all these are important information you need to keep at hand.
To keep your life organized, you should have all this information in one or two places.
Ideally, you should know exactly where to look for an important document, even if you can’t remember the document’s existence.
If you still need to get such a place, buy one big folder and some dividers. Make sure to immediately put all the important documents you already have and all the new ones into their respective division.
Of course, not all important information nowadays comes in physical form, especially since login details are more often digital.
Unless you want to write them all down on paper, consider creating a password-protected spreadsheet that you can access digitally.
2. Create a box for the manuals of all of your devices
I never really knew what to do with the manuals of the devices in my home after I read them.
Logically, you should keep them in case you have questions later on or the device breaks.
But unless you also keep the packaging, which takes up quite a lot of storage, where would you keep the manuals?
The answer: In a neat little box.
Keeping them in a folder would be impractical, considering how small but thick some of the manuals are. That’s why I recommend a box or a drawer.
Either way, ensure you have one place where you know you’ll find the answers to any device-related questions.
Luckily, more and more manuals are also available online. So your box will most likely never overflow.
3. Delete old emails and take care of postponed emails once a week
I’m not talking about work emails. Those are wholly different issues. In fact, many employees spend large amounts of their workday dealing with (at times unnecessary) emails.
No, this tip on how to organize your life is about your private emails. Some are important, others are newsletters, and too many are spam.
If an email doesn’t seem urgent, we often don’t deal with it immediately but rather take a quick look and leave it in our inbox to deal with in the future.
To keep your life organized, you also need to keep your inbox organized. That means blocking some time every week to deal with old emails.
Dealing with them will most often mean deleting them. Some of them may be important for later reference. Those emails should be in a separate folder in your account.
With these weekly email cleanses, your inbox will be a neatly organized place you don’t dread visiting.
4. Put worn-through clothes aside immediately and replace them the next time you purchase clothing
Holes in socks and underwear are inevitable with long-time use. And it’s easy to think that you’ll wear them just one more time and then again just one more time and again and again.
Eventually, you will find yourself with few presentable socks, which can lead to slightly embarrassing situations at the doctor’s or when you visit someone at their home.
An organized life also means keeping track of the state of your clothes and when they need replacing.
The easiest way to do that is by putting the clothes immediately aside once you notice a tear or hole.
You don’t have to immediately buy a replacement. But the next time you buy some clothes, you only have to look at the clothes you put aside to know what you have to restock.
5. Check your finances once a month and keep track of your expenses/income
Another tip on how to organize your life is to always know how much money you have. After all, if you know how much you have, you also know how much you can spend without amounting to debt.
You also need to know how you spend your money and what expenses can be expected in the near future.
Different programs can help you track how you spend and earn your money.
Looking at your financial history and current financial situation once a month will help you make smarter decisions and keep you out of trouble.
6. Put things back in their designated place as soon as you don’t need them anymore
Leaving things lying around in random places is a bad habit that creates a cluttered environment and wastes a lot of time searching for things.
To keep your life organized, you should know exactly what item belongs in which place and always put it back once you finish using it.
7. Always have a digital or physical notebook with you to braindump
It’s hard to focus with thoughts flowing around your head. Some might even be important for later, and it would be a shame to forget about them.
That’s why it’s important to always have something at hand to quickly braindump your thoughts before focusing all your attention on the task again.
One such brain dump place can be the notes app on your phone; you could also record short memos.
8. Check your braindump places at least once a week and deal with or reorganize the information
It’s easy to forget the random thoughts you’ve written down throughout the day. But often enough, some real gold can be found there, so they shouldn’t be disregarded.
So take some time, once a week, to review these notes and deal with the information as needed.
9. Get rid of old and useless information, documents, photos, and miscellaneous things
Being organized also means knowing when to get rid of things. The more you hoard, the more difficult it will be to keep your life organized.
Therefore, you should take some time at least once a year to eliminate useless things.
Photos that you’ll never look at again, clothes you never wear anyways, funny gadgets you haven’t used in ages, etc. All these things should be thrown out before your storage spaces overflow.
10. Make Backups and use the Cloud!!!
Organized people prepare for worst-case scenarios. This includes losing access to the contents of your digital devices.
Our whole life is on our phones, laptops, or tablets. I’ve heard from multiple students at university who lost weeks or even months of hard work because they didn’t save their documents in the cloud before their laptops broke down.
You might also lose many contacts and chat history if you don’t back up your phone regularly.
Another tip for organizing your life is to arrange a backup system.
If you have enough storage in your cloud, you should be able to automize it. If not, then you should save your data manually at regular intervals.
11. Schedule all due dates in a digital calendar immediately, no matter how far in the future they are
Do you know all the subscriptions that are running in your name? Do you know when the next payment is due and by which date you can cancel them?
What about your ID, passport, credit card, and driver’s license? How long do you have until you need to renew them?
Oh, and let’s not forget all your vaccinations. Do you know in how many years you have to boost them?
The older we get, the more due dates fill our life. Unsurprisingly, we can’t remember all of them.
However, forgetting these deadlines is inconvenient (you can’t travel far if your passport is past its expiration date) and incredibly expensive (yearly subscriptions can be pricey, and you want to cancel them in time).
The best way to keep up with all these dates is by writing them down into a digital calendar as soon as you know about them.
This goes especially for those due dates that are years in the future. They might not seem urgent yet, but those are the most likely to be forgotten.
On a rate from 1-10, how organized would you say your life is? If it’s not a 10, which of these tips will you try to improve your organization?
We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Until next time, Felicity Seeker!
