How to Organize Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Introduction
Are you feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to organize your life? You're not alone. Many people struggle with finding clarity and direction in their busy lives. In this comprehensive guide, I'll share my own tried-and-true methods for organizing my life in a way that fosters productivity and peace of mind. This article is divided into three key steps: the importance of externalizing your thoughts, prioritizing tasks, and setting a clear timeline.
Step 1: Fireworks – Externalizing Your Thoughts
The Power of Writing Down Ideas
The first step to organizing your life is to see what you're working with. Externalizing your thoughts allows you to escape the chaos in your head. I firmly believe in the power of analog methods—using a pen and paper—over digital tools, at least at this stage. Writing by hand provides a tactile experience that helps you offload and clarify your ideas.
- Why Analog?
- Sensory Engagement: Writing by hand engages your senses and helps you connect better with your thoughts.
- Minimized Distractions: When you're on a digital device, notifications can easily draw your attention away from what you're trying to capture.
Instead of getting lost in digital distractions, try focusing on your thoughts the old-fashioned way. By doing this, you allow the creativity within you to flow freely, much like how Remy in Ratatouille experiences fireworks when tasting flavors. Embrace the chaos at first; clarity will come with time.
Step 2: Prioritization – Balancing Time and Attention
Understanding Your Resources
As you begin to organize your thoughts, it’s essential to confront the two most limited resources we all face: time and attention. To make the most of your life, you need to prioritize effectively. Here are the key points to consider:
-
The Eisenhower Matrix:
This tool allows you to categorize tasks into four quadrants:- Urgent and Important
- Not Urgent but Important
- Urgent but Not Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
By distinguishing what needs your attention versus what can wait, you gain control over your tasks.
-
Valuable Conversations:
Discussing your plans and priorities with trusted friends or mentors can provide outside perspectives that help you assess your expectations better.
Step 3: Creating a Timeline for Clarity
Setting Realistic Goals
After you’ve collected your thoughts and started prioritizing, the final step is creating a three-month timeline. Here's why three months is the sweet spot:
- Manageable: A three-month timeframe allows you to set achievable goals without feeling overwhelmed.
- Visible Progress: In 90 days, you can see measurable growth in your projects.
How to Create Your Timeline
- Transcribe Your Notes: Start with what you’ve previously written down to ensure no ideas are lost.
- Visual Layout: Create a hand-drawn visual of your timeline, indicating when each project starts and ends.
- Color Code: Differentiate projects using color coding for clarity at a glance.
- Mood Boards: If a timeline isn’t suitable for you, consider creating a mood board to represent your goals visually.
Conclusion
In summary, organizing your life involves three steps: externalizing your thoughts, prioritizing tasks, and creating a clear timeline. By using pen and paper to get your ideas out, prioritizing based on urgency and importance, and effectively planning your next few months, you’ll find clarity in your journey. Remember, it’s okay to embrace the chaos and allow yourself time to refine your priorities.
If you're looking to dive deeper into personal documentation, check out my new Skillshare class focused on intentional documentation. Learn to capture your experiences meaningfully while channeling your creativity.
Whether you're using traditional methods or exploring digital options, the aim is to find what works best for you. Get started on organizing your life today!
i would imagine considering you clicked on this video that you're looking for a way to organize your life
it's easy to get lost in the weeds but fortunately i found that with a few simple practices
i can see my life and what i need to do a lot more clearly i'm gonna split this up into three parts
step one fireworks to organize my life i have found that i must see what i'm organizing
it is amazing to me how few people actually do this there's truly nothing like creating the
i am asking you in a sense to channel your inner da vinci i love using notepads to organize my
ideas you can use a journal or software if you prefer that the important thing is to keep all these
potentially lead you to losing them if you're familiar with my videos the next thing i'm going to say is not going to
a pen and paper and not anything digital not at this stage at least there isn't a productivity app or piece
of software in existence that comes anywhere close to the power of the pen and paper in my opinion
something about physically doing this is really really important to me i'll leave a link in the description to what i use
to think about which is that whenever you're on your phone or your computer you're always two clicks away from a
i think it's worth it i really do so why am i calling this first stage fireworks you know that scene in
this is kind of how i feel when there's a flow of ideas out of my head and through my hand
i've always found that feeling very exciting and i would just say to drop the expectations
it's normal not to feel clear about what your future holds there's a lot going on in all of our lives and in the world
today in my experience this first stage is really quite chaotic and that's totally fine
redraw and rewrite them out i think refinements are totally fine and i will often do that and each time
brings greater clarity the point here is that there is great power in seeing what is going on in your
head and not just thinking those thoughts so oftentimes it's to do's it's doubts
these things as in coming up with a visual that i can draw out that pairs up with that thought or idea
no backup plan i found myself thinking about failure quite a bit and so i took the time to draw out
first it just had to come out because i wasn't sure where it was going to take me there's a skill that i see people
seriously lack it is the ability the capacity to externalize their ideas and this is the place to start step two
prioritization i talk a lot about two resources that we all have a limited amount of and that
we all must confront and deal with in our own ways and those two resources are time and attention and having limits on
these two resources requires us to prioritize you can't do it all i wish i had a thousand lives
that i would have the time to do all the things that i want to do to create all the things that i want to
is to make the most of it there are a whole variety of different ways that you can go about prioritizing
a matrix like this or not is this kind of thinking this sort of distinguishing between what
needs to get done and what doesn't necessarily need to get done my favorite way of doing this
what is important to me and where i place my time and energy but it doesn't hurt to have
pretty unrealistic about what i can accomplish in a certain span of time so it's helpful to have people that
bring you back to earth there's a lot that i could say on this topic but what i found is the most valuable
people to bounce your ideas off of are people that you respect people that believe in you but that are
what i have found throughout my own experimentation in organizing myself and my life and my thoughts is
that i cannot see clearly beyond three months from now actually i think the magic number is more like
two two and a half months but three months remains a very round number that i like to work with it's a
can happen in 90 days but at the same time it's not too much to handle i feel like in the span of 90 days you
i've done videos on how i organize myself both on a shorter and longer time frame and i'll link to
both of those down below but for now we're going to focus on three months what i do is i transcribe
a lot of my notes and crazy scribbling and chaotic messiness from step one with a deeper understanding of what i
need to prioritize from step two on a hand-drawn timeline that i create for myself and it's helpful for
that i'm working on with the vertical access which helps me see them more clearly you know you can
color code this you can do whatever you want now again there's a lot of ways that you can
actually go about doing this it doesn't have to be a literal timeline years ago i would
focus on in the coming three months things absolutely never pan out a hundred percent as we planned them to
but i have found that on a three-month time frame you can consciously work towards specific goals
that you create for yourself and that's basically how i do it so to recap it's extremely important to
to draw them doesn't matter get them out of your head and make that a skill of yours where you're not editing
you're not preventing this from happening you're just going for it it's hard to have a clarity
on what you need to prioritize when you don't even know what you're prioritizing for example
and that's the second step prioritizing and finally i lay out these to-do's these projects these ideas
across a timeline what are the things that i want to be focusing on over the next three months and if a
timeline doesn't work for you a mood board or something along those lines is an alternative it's another way
to approach this that's how i do it i hope this helps this video is sponsored by skillshare i
have a new class on there by the way that i just released it's my second one after seeing the
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know by the way if you do if you find it helpful and interesting i feel like i've built
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what they have to offer thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching i'll see you