Organising life and work

 I offer my experiences with organising my stuff in the hope that it may be of some value to others: 

I think a basic idea with organising is to have life broken into lots of tasks and allocate time to each task. A kind of ideal state is when you don’t have to think about what to do next or what to do today; that’s all decided and you just have to go about doing what was planned. Of course, that means that you schedule time in for planning and scheduling. And it could take quite a bit of time, but its time well spent. All this may sound to many people like a mechanical and soulless existence. It did, to me too. But when you take on organising yourself and gain some mastery, life on this side feels a lot more fulfilling, peaceful and ordered. Its also key to getting a lot more done. 

Being good at this stuff is particularly important if you want to work on your own (like a freelancer) or you want to take some time off. In these sorts of situations you have to be very disciplined about structuring your time, as there is no outside order that is imposed on you, like when you work at a salaried job. 

The other fundamental thing about organising is to clarify for yourself what you want to achieve and in what time frame. This exercise is something that most of us are completely unfamiliar with and uncomfortable with, beyond some basic annual planning exercise at work. But it has enormous value. Can you think about where you want to be in different aspects of your life in 10 years ? 5 years ? A year ? Start with the longest timeframe that you can and then work backwards to set milestones for shorter timeframes. Keep these goals 'visible' to you in some way, like pasting them up especially the longer-term ones. Its very easy to forget about longer-term things when caught up in the demands of daily life. 

Most of the time, I work with a spreadsheet for organising myself. I try to to capture everything about my life that matters to me on that sheet. It has worksheets like “Dashboard”, “Health” , “Finances” , “Personal”, “Special Projects” 

My basic unit of work is a to-do item and I maintain lots of to-do lists

Its important to get to-do's out of your head and on the spreadsheet (or whatever you use to plan). When tasks are in your head, they take your attention away from what you should be giving your attention to. By putting them on your spreadsheet (and developing a habit of scheduling them and doing them) you get them quickly out of your head.

When you have a fast-moving to-do list, like stuff that needs to get done at work this week, I find it motivating to mark off those things that are done in green or keep track of them by what percentage is still to be done so I get a feeling of making progress. 

One particular kind of to-do that is useful is what I whimsically call “Small small things”. These are (as the name suggests) small tasks (like filling out an expense report, or buying something ) that are not difficult to do but that may be irksome or that you tend to put off. You could set up a routine of blocking off time on your calendar each day to attend to these. Occasionally, set a whole day aside for these. 

A very nice tool is the Momentum extension for the Chrome browser. You can download it here, its free. I use it atleast some of the time, and whenever I do, it always pays off. The key thing it has is a question “What is your main focus for the day?” and an answer that you write down and that you see everytime you open a new browser window or tab. Wonderful for clarifying your own priority for the day and sticking to it. 

Finally, one  requirement for success in organising is beyond any ideas and tools like the above. Its the ability to follow through and do painful tasks that need to be done. You can plan and schedule all you want, but when the time comes you need to have the discipline to do whatever needs to be be done and what you scheduled. If you procrastinate or avoid, some key things will not get done and your success is at risk. 

If you’re by nature a unsystematic person and find the above far too difficult to do but you want to do it, Landmark’s Self Expression and Leadership Programme is a powerful way to practise and gain the discipline of organising

Do leave a comment if you found any of the above useful to you, or add your own organising tips 

Afternotes:

The above is what I aspire to, its not what I always or fully do. The next level of mastery is always out there..

Deepak Menon (https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepak-menon-0468045) says he finds a combination of Trello and Google Calendar very effective. Hopefully a guest post from him on this soon