1How to Be Organized in Life by Reducing Before You Start

The first thing you have to do when you are learning how to be organized in life is to get rid of the stuff you don’t need to organize.

Look at an extra closet. You can spend all day organizing its contents and you can spend a bunch of money on cool looking closet organizers. However, you still have to much stuff in your closet.

How much easier would it be to get organized if you only had to deal with half of the stuff you that is in the closet?

Start by pulling everything out of the closet, and only put back the stuff that you really love or that you use frequently. Make separate boxes for everything else. These boxes should include the following:

• Throw it away
• Donate it
• Sell it
• Maybe

Your “maybe” box should be the items you’re still on the fence about. Put these items in a cardboard box and store it in your attic or your basement. Make sure that you label the box so you can easily find something if you need it.

By the time you get around to cleaning the attic or the basement, if the box hasn’t been needed for anything, you know it’s time to get rid of it.

Follow this first step of how to be organized in life to everything. If you’re organizing your schedule, first remove the items that don’t really need to be done. If you’re organizing your office, start by removing all of the items you don’t really need.

2Write It Down

There may have been a time in your life when you really could remember everything, but for most people that time is very short lived. If you want to be organized in life you should write things down as you think of them. When you have time, you can convert these random thoughts into to-do lists, or put them into your main planner or calendar.

3Improve Your Organization By Using a Single Inbox

If you want to be better organized, you have to put items that may need your attention in one place. Once a day you should go through your inbox item by item.

Each time you pick up an item, decide how it needs to be handled. Here are your options:

• Do it now
• Toss it
• Delegate it
• File it
• Add it to your to-do list

It’s tempting to delay making a decision, but that will only let your inbox grow and become unmanageable. The biggest step to being organized in life is to really concentrate on only handling everything once.

4Designate a Home for Everything

One of the problems that people who are poorly organized have is that when they don’t know where to put something, they don't do anything with it. That results in clutter everywhere!

Go through the areas that you want to have better organized and determine where everything belongs. You may find it helpful to use labels for this, especially in the beginning.

You will be surprised and how easy it is to stay organized when everything has a home.

This doesn’t just apply to physical items. The same concept should be applied to information as well. There are many free services online that act as your own personal filing system. You can keep a list of movies you want to see, your grocery list, notes for a project you are working on, etc.

Since so many people have smart phones, this information will be accessible to you virtually anywhere, anytime.

If you want to know how to be organized in life, make sure everything has a place that it is supposed to be.

5Put Everything Away to Be Better Organized

This is a big difference between people who are better organized and those who are not. Since step 4 was to make sure everything has a home, step 5 is to make it a point to put things away.

If you put it away now, it will literally take 3 seconds to walk across the kitchen. If you decide to throw it on the counter and put it away later, it will be cluttering up your kitchen for days (along with everything else you didn't put away).

If you follow this organization tip, you will find that it very quickly becomes a habit.

6Clean as You Go

Organization tip #6 follows the concept in #5. It’s always easier to handle smaller tasks than larger ones. Don’t make a mess in the kitchen and plan to clean it up later. Later may become tomorrow or even the next day.

As you’re cooking, put the dishes in the dishwasher when you’re done with them. Wipe of the countertop when it gets dirty. When you’re done, there won’t be nearly the mess that needs to be cleaned and organized.

This applies to other situations as well. If you handle things as you are going along, it isn’t such a daunting project to tackle.

7How to Be Organized in Life Summary

Being organized isn’t about having fancy tools and systems. It’s just about developing a few simple habits that can be applied to both your life at home as well as life at work.

Do you have any other organization tips that someone else may benefit from?

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