Tips On Improving Your Organizational Skills
What does your typical day look like? A few seconds of locating your charger, a couple of minutes to find your car keys, and more time to track down your work files- all that time trickles down to hours of lost productivity and loads of frustration. We get it; organizational skills don’t come naturally to everyone.
However, there’s room to cultivate and turn them into habitual practices. Our daily lives are demanding as is, so the last thing you need is a disruption to backtrack your schedule. Developing logical and controlled strategies to manage your everyday tasks is the best approach to a successful and less stressful life.
Even for the bunch that works best under pressure, decluttering is a great tool for improved decision making, problem-solving and overall performance. Organizational skills are just one of the few tools that work well beyond your immediate environment.
Five ways to boost your organizational game
Organizing is vital, from the corporate world to mundane life tasks. Having an established structure significantly improves the quality of work and productivity you put out in your days.
Whether you’re jotting down something as simple as your weekly grocery list or drafting a mega business project, you’ll find that breaking down those tasks and roles to match your time and space demands to be lifesaving.
So, if calm, order, and flow are attributes you crave on chaotic days, then organizational skills should do it for you. Ahead we dissect five different ways to bring a sense of organization into your life.
Improving Organizational Skills: Plan your time
What do you do in the first fifteen minutes of waking up? Scroll through your phone? Don’t sweat it; we all fall victim to those little monsters. Consider dedicating that fraction of your morning to planning out your day for a change. Make a mental check of all the objectives you’ve set to achieve in their order of priority and allocate time to them. Not a morning person? No problem. Adjust your tasks around your most productive time of the day and get to strategizing.
To-do lists
You can never go wrong with the good old to-do list- a tip all successful planners swear by. Write down all the tasks and responsibilities lined up for the day either in their order of urgency or convenience. Writing puts those mental notes into a referential list so you can go about your day scheduling, planning, and crossing out the completed tasks. The best part? You can download the free todo list app that lets you keep track of your objectives and notifies you of scheduled times and deadlines; it doesn’t get better than that!
Smart filing
We all go through days where we can’t seem to find anything under the sun. Having to shuffle through every single drawer for the electrical bill, turning your closet inside out for that one particular tie, and the classic- where are the keys?
Finding and seeking frustrations can often be sorted out with a smart filing technique. Take the time to go through your stuff before sorting out the junk; this leaves you room to create an orderly and reliable storage system for them. For instance, you can invest in filing software to organize your bills, contracts, work projects, and receipts into folders.
Early birding
Last-minute thrills are a gamble, even for the pressure-driven achievers. Don’t wait to have deadlines snapping at your feet to get started on tasks, have an early start. There’s so much uncertainty in how our days unfold, and while we could have everything planned out to the last detail, there are things that we cannot foresee, say late deliveries and emergencies. Getting a head start on your responsibilities always leaves you room for flexibility and perfection, so why wait?
Dodge distractions
Phone chimes, pop-up notifications, random phone calls, and the occasional scroll through Instagram, we all have our poison. Distractions are by far the greatest derailers when it comes to task completion.
But here’s the thing, once you have your distraction triggers noted, you can always work your way through avoiding them. For instance, download an app to temporarily disable the distractive features on your phone or switch off your gadget altogether for a couple of hours until you get the job done.
Improving Organizational Skills: Bottom line
When it comes to organization, it’s always the little things that make a difference. Effortless measures like tidying up your workspace or partitioning your drawers go a long way. Ultimately, optimum performance, productivity, success, and focus are best motivated by a clutter-free zone.
The key to a more organized lifestyle is to start small regardless of the sphere. Set realistic goals, take baby steps, and, most importantly, turn these organizational practices into routines. Remember, routines build habits.
