You can have a focused and uncluttered life. It just takes a
few simple steps consistently followed to stay organized and keep
clutter from creating stress and sapping your productivity.
1. Toss most of it, Organize what’s left.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your closet, your email inbox or your
schedule, whenever you have a lot of stuff to organize most of it can
simply be thrown out. If you have 10 projects on your plate today and
you just pick the two most important, you don’t need to organize your
schedule anymore. Same with your closet - take 100 articles of clothing
and reduce it down the 15 you actually wear and your closet has
organized itself.
2. Give your stuff a home.
Every object in your home or office has a home, a place it belongs
when it’s not in use. I like to “clean as I go”, meaning when I find
something not in its home, I take a few seconds to put it there. Now I
never waste time looking for things and I find living/working in an
uncluttered environment much less stressful.
The same goes for your computer. Is your computer desktop covered
in 200 icons? That’s a sure sign you’re not putting your information in
it’s proper home. Get all your data organized into its proper folders
and use a tool like AutoHotkey to launch you programs from the keyboard
rather than hunting around for some icon on your desktop.
I apply this thinking to my schedule as well. If I’m spending time
with my family, I’m not thinking about that big project I’ve got due at
work. Otherwise, I’m not really with my family, I’m working off the
clock in my family’s presence. Thoughts have a proper home too,
although they’re trickier to organize.
3. One inbox to rule them all, always processed to empty.
Keeping multiple inboxes, email addresses, sticky notes pasted
around your office, messages writing in various notebooks - it all adds
up to more stuff to keep track of.
Use one physical inbox to keep track of handwritten notes, snail
mail, or any other hardcopies. Redirect all my various emails (work,
personal) to a single Gmail account where you can process everything at
once. And make sure to get each inbox to empty by the end of the day.
You don’t have to complete every task in your inbox immediately,
but you need to follow the “drop it, delegate it, do it, defer it” rule.
That’s means processing every item in your inbox and…
- Dumping anything you don’t really need
- Handing off anything that can be delegated
- Doing it right away if it’ll take less than two minutes
- Setting up reminders to do longer projects later.
4. Get it out of your head and onto the paper.
Any tasks or ideas you have floating around in your head are “open
loops”, consuming precious mental cycles and stressing you out
needlessly. Get them out of your head and off your mind so you have
more time and brain-power to think about what’s important.
I carry a small notebook and write down everything as it comes to
me, then do a “brain dump” a few times a week to get all those ideas
organized on my calendar and to-do lists. I enjoy the time with my
family more because I’m actually present with them, not repeatedly
going over the details of some project in my mind.
5. Design systems to keep you organized.
Once you get organized, you’ve got to stay organized. Chaos in the
universe is always increasing, and if you don’t fight against it you’ll
soon find your neat, organized environment quickly disorganized again.
Turning your organization systems into a consistent routine and
writing them down keeps them from unraveling. It doesn’t matter if it’s
the way you process your inbox (once daily for me), organize your to-do
lists (twice a week), exercise (three times a week), make sure you stay
with that system.