Four Ways to Organize Your Life Right Now

Between working a full time job, managing this blog and taking on freelance projects, having things organized isn’t an option, it’s a requirement. Bullet Journaling has been a huge help at having everything from my meetings to days off and brainstorming in one place. It’s been a nice change and has definitely helped me keep things together over the past few weeks, which have been extra busy.

Balancing different areas of our lives can absolutely be stressful. We want to be great employees, content creators, friends and family members. Showing up and being your best is 100 times easier when you aren’t wondering where you’re supposed to be at a certain time or where you left that post it with that thing you needed to work on 🙂

I always want to show up and leave people with the best impression of myself and my work as possible. I think this is what motivates me to stay so organized. Whatever helps me get things done effectively and provide the highest quality is what I’m doing. That may mean taking 10 minutes each night to write out the next day’s to do list or avoiding my inbox for the first hour I’m awake or even waking up a few hours earlier to get things done.

A little self discipline goes a long way.

Still, taking a few minutes out of your day to get settled and organized can really do wonders for your productivity. Here are some simple things you can do today to help get yourself and your life a bit more organized.

Prioritize Your Inbox

Going through your inbox is much less daunting when it looks more like an organized pile than a huge mess of energy draining messages. Create a gmail labels to help you visualize what needs to be done within your inbox. I could not imagine my inbox without labels. I have one for each freelance project I’m working on, one for things I need to follow up on, and another for sponsored posts and partnerships. Once something is done with, delete or archive the message. Also unsubscribe from any newsletters or recurring emails that you don’t engage with, they’re just wasting space and time.

Organize Your To Do List Better

Instead of just making a huge list of tasks, add some priority and structure to your daily list. What are the top 3 things you need to get done today? Write those at the top and highlight or note them in a different color so they stand out. Break down other tasks by area of priority. For me, that usually looks like: blog, freelance, home/personal, work. Under each category, try not to add anymore than 2-4 tasks because realistically, you won’t do more than that anyway.

Create a future log

To my fellow bullet journalers, this won’t be an odd concept. A future log is essentially a long term planning tool, like a monthly calendar. You can use it to list events and important tasks coming up without having to go into much detail. See some examples and read up on the method more here. Having a future log is a great way to organize long off and recurring things like birthdays, anniversaries, annual meetings or big deadlines. Just flip to it at the start of each week to see what’s coming up.

Backup Your Work

I have so many photos and videos that I work with it can be hard to keep up. I use dropbox to organize and share my photos and keep backups of my photos and all of my videos on an external hard drive. I add everything into folders and subfolders. My system goes something like this:

Media Type (images/videos) > Year > Month > Topic (i.e Organization Blog Post) > Unedited Files / Edited Files > image.jpg

It makes it super simple for me to find anything I’m looking for based on when I created it. I never worry about missing or losing work because I store it in on my hard drive and Dropbox.