We are all so busy in our lives. Our jobs seem to grow with us, and at some point, we all feel overwhelmed by the quantity of things that are to be done. We have so much going on in our heads that inevitably things slip or go wrong. There is no doubt that being organised will help you to be effective at getting on top of your actions and getting things done successfully.
So, are you an organised person? If yes, great! It’s good to feel in control, isn’t it?
If not, why not? Is being organised just not important to you? Do you think that you are just not the kind of person who can be organised, or do you feel you do not have time to get organised?
Maybe it’s now time to think that your time is valuable to you. You need to decide that being organised is achievable. We are all busy with the stuff that the day to day throws at us, and we need to appreciate that spending time doing activities that are wasteful can be avoided. After all, do you really want to spend weeks of your life searching for things you can’t find or fixing problems that you should have got right first time?
The first step is to organise your mindset. You need to choose to get organised – that means a shift in how you do things from the way you approach tasks to the way you organise your workspace. But, as useful as the tools, techniques and top tips are that we can offer you, I want to make clear:
You truly need to challenge yourself and start believing that you can and will be organised.
Once you are on that, our three top tips to help you organise your mindset are:
1) Get a system to keep on track of ALL your actions. Don’t keep hand written to do lists all over the place. Keep one list which you update regularly, ideally one you can assign deadlines to. We use Wunderlist here – it is great because we can also assign actions to our colleagues and keep on top of progress.
2) Have an approach to deal with the jobs that come up, we like David Allen’s Approach in “Getting Things Done” where only actions that will take less than 2 minutes get actioned immediately. Other actions get planned or delegated, guess what – using Wunderlist.
3) Organise your space. 5S is a great Lean technique where you only keep what you need, in the most logical space to make your work flow. You keep the space clean and in good working order, and always keeping it that way. After all you don’t want to keep hold of things that you no longer want or need.
So, why not start to organise your mindset now? Also, these tips can apply to both work and in your personal life too, which is also really important when trying to get some sort of work-life-balance.
