A Practical Guide to Start Organizing your Time
If you go through the day overwhelmed and unsure whether you're doing everything you're supposed to, or have a nagging feeling that you're missing something—You're not alone. Plenty of people have information overload, especially when we're expected to be on top of a million things at all times. That's likely the reason why you feel desperately in need of some life administration. This is a practical guide with a way to begin.
Start with your goal
The reason why you want to begin organizing shouldn't be, "I want to get more done in the same amount of time." It should be "I want to have time for what truly matters." Otherwise, you'll be stuck in an endless loop of organizing and re-organizing as you try to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of your schedule. The point here is for you to be more satisfied and calmer during the day.
Here are some examples of possible goals:
Getting into a workout routine
Writing a novel
Finishing a project
Learning how to draw
Studying a new language
Spending more time with family
Having time to just relax and breathe
Note down a couple of goals, then pick one. If you're struggling between a few, you can either just roll a dice to pick, or use these questions from Charlie Gilkey's book "Start Finishing" that I find particularly helpful:
Which of the items wouldn’t hurt you at all if you cut them?
Which items would you be more relieved to no longer carry?
Which items are shoulds or relate to other people thriving, not you?
Which items are good but don’t relate to something that frustrates, annoys,angers, inspires, nourishes, or calls to you?
Either way, narrow down your goal to just one for the purposes of this exercise. Baby steps!
Launch The Time Finder
I recently was going through my old book notes, and found something from the book, "No Plot, No Problem!" The book is a guide on how to finish writing a novel in 30 days for the NanoWriMo challenge, and one of my notes from it particularly stuck out to me.
It's called the Time Finder. It was originally intended as a way to find time to complete your novel writing during the day, but I have since realized can be a powerful life administrative tool.
Take a physical notebook or notepad. Don't put it in a Google Doc or other digital file—Pen & paper is recommended for a clear reason here: a digital tool is one more item to manage.
Carry it with you wherever you go from the beginning to the end of the day, and write everything you do that day in an hourly format. Do this for a couple days to a week, depending on how different your days generally are.
It's pretty straight-forward. The goal here is that by the end of the week, you will see patterns emerge. What you're spending excessive time on, what you're clearly not spending enough time on, your spending habits, etc. Once you've gotten a clear handle of your routine, it's time to...
Start Organizing
This is where you start making trade-offs and identifying what truly matters. Go through your routine and categorize your habits as follows—You can use colored pencils, highlighters, or color pens, the writing tool doesn't matter, just that you're categorizing them appropriately.
Red: Required activities. These are things like work or school, that can't be compromised on.
Blue: Highly desired activities. These are things you want to do as much as possible, like catching your favorite show live, that you really want to do but are fine sacrificing if necessary.
Green: Forgo-able activities. This is the main thing you're looking for, and consist of areas that seem like time-wasters or could be delegated away from you: These are things like unnecessary shopping trips, social media binges, etc.
Once you've done this, start optimizing by seeing what activities can be consolidated or optimized. Take another sheet of paper and start writing down a new schedule.
For example, if you make multiple grocery trips during the week, see if you can consolidate them into a single trip. If you're checking your email multiple times a day, see if you can limit it to once in the morning, and once before bed. In general, the key here is to see how much time you can free up without cutting anything yet.
Once you've done that, see how much free time you can cut to spend to advancing toward your goal. Start with the Green activities, then move to blue. If you're noticing that most of your activities are red, either relax your standards of "strictly necessary" or start talking to friends and relatives about whether they can help with delegating some activities. For example, if you're a sole caretaker of a child, see if there's someone who can help babysit so you can get some free time to yourself. Additionally, you can also look at local community programs that provide support too.
The goal here is to free up at least 2 hours in the week to ensure that you're giving yourself enough time to actively work toward the goal mentioned in your first step. Ideally you'll be able to free about 4-6 hours so that you have more time for relaxation too.
So that's a simple guide to begin organizing your time. You can go a lot further than this, but this is a solid start for you to make headway on mindfully managing your time. At least that is, until a mad scientist invents a real-life Time Finder. That would truly be an product worthy of the phrase "Time is money."