If you constantly feel the need to be more organised, or spend hours looking for something in your house/office, or you find yourself spacing out on appointments and schedules, then it is time to reset.
“Let all things be done decently and in order”- 1 Corinthians 14:40
If you had an hour to devote to resetting some areas of your life, what would you begin with? Perhaps it’s a spiritual habit that needs revitalisation, perhaps its an adjustment to your daily routine that will allow you to sleep a bit longer, or a rededication to keeping your financial life in order. It might even be as simple as cleaning out a drawer at work or a wardrobe at home.
1. DECLUTTER: The very first step to organising a chaotic life is to declutter your life. It is important to remove all the junk in order to create space for the good and new to come in. Until this is done, regardless of how beautiful a schedule, a plan or even a new outfit, if all you do is add it to the already cluttered ones, you end up unable to find it when you need it, or enjoy its usefulness.
2. CREATE A MISSION STATEMENT: I know this might sound a tad strange to you, but if you strive to organise your life and declutter your mind, then there is a strong need to create a mission statement. If you thought mission statements were only for companies, then you are wrong. Creating a mission statement helps to give you a brighter and more precision-based focus on what you want and do not want in your life. By creating a mission statement, you are laser-focusing your life and organising your mind in the process.
3. SET GOALS: Goals have the power to help you further your agenda in life by giving you a target of what you are aiming at. Now that your mission statement has helped you achieve what you want and do not want, setting goals will help you to put some spatial recognition to those things, i.e. helping you figure out when you want certain things, why you want them and specifically be able to measure your progress towards them.
4. CLEAN HOUSE, CLEAN MIND: In order to effectively organise and declutter your life, you have to organise your surroundings. When your home is messy, cluttered with things strewn all about, it becomes difficult to have any sense of mental organisation or purpose. While some people bask in chaos, it really does not serve anyone at the end. To organise your life, do a deep clean from top to bottom; from your house, to your car, office and everything else that you know needs to be cleaned and fully organised. One of the things I found out is that, whenever I refuse to organise and clean my surrounding, my mind has a funny way of cataloging my to-dos in the depth of my subconscious and using it to help me put other things off. Believe me the hard part is simply getting started.
5. ELIMINATE STRESS: Of course everyone has stress in their lives and we cannot simply say that we will eliminate all of the stress in our lives, because often times we are at the mercy of several external forces that include other people and situations. If you can strive to daily eliminate stress, you can focus more on the things that matter to you in the long term. Stress has a way of making us lose sight of what we are reaching for, and that is why having a mission statement and goals comes in handy by helping you put things in perspective. You are able to see clearly what fits and what doesn’t. And for those things that do not fit, you are able to come up with some policies for eliminating them from your life.
6. TIME MANAGEMENT: I’m a strong believer in carefully managing your time by using the Eisenhower principle where everything is categorised by its level of urgency and importance. Everything can fall into the category of either urgent or not urgent, and important or not important. When you can organise your daily tasks and look at things that come up as fitting into these four quadrants in life, then you can better tackle things that are important and thereby effectively managing your time.
7. DEVELOP BETTER ROUTINES: Life is a set of routines and habits that become ingrained in us. In order to have an organised life, you must strive to build better routines. This does not take an enormous amount of effort; all it takes is consistent and daily action to build the habit over time.
About the Writer: Eniola Adeniji is a woman after God’s own heart, a motivational Writer, Speaker, Fashion and Photography addict. She is also a Business Developer, Social Media Manager and the founder of Woman Of Value. She blogs at ennmae.wordpress.com
