How to Organize Your Life: 11 Habits to Help Keep You Organized

Today’s post is all about how to organize your life by adopting a few key habits to help your days run more smoothly.

How to organize your life: why it matters

There are so many benefits of living in an organized way. Being organized helps your days run more smoothly. As well as helps simplify your life overall, making your days feel easier and less chaotic. Rather than feeling like you’re always scrambling to keep up or do things. Or missing or forgetting things more often than you’d like.

Learning how to organize your life helps you feel more in control and on top of things in your life. Which is a great way to reduce stress and make your days feel more orderly, under control and enjoyable overall.

Building habits are the key to getting organized

For some people, the habits required to get and stay organized come more naturally than for others.

But even if you don’t consider yourself naturally organized, or learning how to organize your life doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t worry! Anyone can learn these habits to help keep you more organized.

The key is building strong habits through consistency and repetition until they become solid habits that feel natural to you.

Start slow, working on one habit at a time. Repeat that habit consistently until it becomes part of your routine. Then start building another habit.

By starting slow and focusing on consistency, you can build habits that will help you get organized and simplify your life now. As well as best support you to stay organized moving forward.

How to organize your life: 11 habits to help keep you organized

With that said, here are 11 habits you can start practicing and implementing today to help you get and stay organized.

Each of these 11 habits individually is a great way to organize and simplify your life. But when you add them all up and get to a place where you can consistently practice all of them, they will have a huge impact on your life. Helping you organize your life and help your days run a lot more smoothly!

Start with any of these habits. Once you’ve got one built into your daily routine, add another. Each time you build a new habit to help you organize your life, you’ll start feeling more organized and in control of your days!

1. Simplify

One key to organizing your life is simplifying and eliminating unnecessary complications.

Focus on being a creative problem solver. Always looking for ways to do tasks in a simpler, more efficient way. Basically, looking for ways to “work smarter, not harder”.

Keep an eye out for pain points in your days. Or tasks, times of day, etc. that don’t seem to flow well, regularly cause stress or frustration, or you feel like could be streamlined.

Then become an active problem solver. Looking for ways to simplify, remove unnecessary steps, make it easier, make it flow better, etc.

Here are a couple of examples of ways to simplify and streamline daily tasks:

• Creating a 5-week rotating meal plan to meal plan on autopilot
• Using uniform dressing or a few outfit formulas you can repeat on a regular basis to make it simpler to decide what to wear each day

2. Build routines and rhythms for basic daily tasks

When you build strong routines and rhythms to make sure the basic, daily tasks of running your home get done, it considerably simplifies your life. And helps you feel more organized and on top of things at home.

You don’t have to waste decision-making power each day on repetitive daily and weekly tasks. Instead having these routines, habits and rhythms help ensure the daily and weekly basics get done almost automatically.

Not only making it easier to keep up with the basics at home. But also ensuring you can stay on top of them with more ease and feel more organized overall.

3. Have a clear to-do list each day

Another important key to organizing your life is clearly knowing what needs to be done each day and what’s a priority.

The first step of this is having a clear to-do list each day. This helps you stay focused, find clarity and stay motivated to make sure the most important tasks get done each day.

It also helps you map out and plan out your days so you’re less likely to be surprised by tasks or events you’ve forgotten about or didn’t plan for.

Your to-do list can be on paper or in a digital format. The key is figuring out what format works best for you to help you organize your days, stay on track and get your most important tasks done each day.

4. Prioritize your to-do list

The second part of using a to-do list to help organize your life is prioritizing what’s on your list.

Not all things on your list will be of equal importance and priority. Clearly identifying what is most important or a priority to accomplish helps you focus on those things first. As well as identifying things you don’t need to do right now. Or maybe don’t need to do at all.

It’s a great idea to list your top 3 priorities on your to-do list each day. The things that are most important to do first.

Not only so you can do what matters most and what is essential first. But also to help remind you to keep your to-do list aligned with your values, goals and priorities.

Not only that but prioritizing your to-do list can help you differentiate between taking action on what matters versus staying busy. It can be easy to keep yourself busy doing less important tasks so you feel productive and organized. But end up avoiding or not getting to the most important tasks that should take priority.

Another benefit of prioritizing your to-do list is it keeps your to-do list realistic.

An endless to-do list can leave you feeling discouraged, defeated or like you’re failing when you can’t get everything done. But when you identify your top 3 priorities, you’ll know you’re focusing on what matters most first. Helping remind you to be realistic with your time and how much you can accomplish.

5. Avoid procrastination

Another benefit of a prioritized to-do list is how it encourages you to be proactive and avoid putting things off.

If there’s something you don’t want to do today, you likely won’t want to do it anymore tomorrow or the next day. But when you procrastinate a task, it will continue hanging over your head, and staying in your mind, until you finally get it done.

Not to mention when you procrastinate a bunch of tasks, they pile up and can quickly start feeling overwhelming.

It’s usually better to get tasks (especially tasks you don’t want to do) done sooner and avoid procrastinating them.

Also, if there are little tasks needing to be done, try to do them right away. If it takes less than a minute to do something, try to do it right away instead of saving it for later and letting those little tasks pile up.

6. Clear the clutter

Clutter in your space can feel overwhelming and make it hard to feel organized. Get rid of anything you don’t use, need or love to save time, space and energy.

Decluttering regularly helps keep your home and spaces functioning well. As well as makes it easier to feel organized overall and on top of things in your space.

But decluttering your home isn’t always easy! If you want some guidance to declutter and simplify your home, check out my decluttering guide, Your Clutter-Free Home.

Your Clutter-Free Home is a detailed decluttering guide with step-by-step decluttering checklists for each room in your home. Making it simple, manageable and stress-free to clear the clutter one step at a time.

Learn more and check out Your Clutter-Free Home HERE.

7. A place for everything

Once you’ve decluttered your home, the next step in getting organized is having a place to keep everything.

Having a place to keep everything saves so much time, stress and energy. As well as makes it so much easier to get organized and stay that way.

When everything has a place to keep it, it’s easy to find things when you need them. As well as reducing mess and visual clutter in your home, and keeping clutter from piling up.

8. Clean as you go

One important key to getting organized is stopping mess from building up to the point where it overwhelms you.

A great way to do that is by staying on top of any mess throughout the day by cleaning as you go. Rather than letting things pile up to deal with during designated cleaning times throughout the day or week.

Here are some examples of ways to clean as you go:

• Put items away as soon as you’re done using them.
• Never leave a room empty-handed, instead, always look for something to take with you and put away.
• Clean as you cook to keep your kitchen tidier and reduce clean-up time.
• Get in the habit of resetting a space when you’re done using it to keep it ready for the next time you’ll use it.

It’s easier to clean as you go after you’ve thoroughly decluttered and have designated places to keep everything. So definitely start with those habits.

But cleaning as you go about your day is a great way to keep your home tidy, and not overwhelming, without having to spend big chunks of time cleaning up.

9. Deal with paperwork daily

Paperwork is something that can quickly pile up, causing clutter and stress. Not to mention feeling disorganized and worrying you’re missing or forgetting things.

Deal with both physical (mail, school papers, bills, etc.) as well as digital (email, messages, etc.) paperwork on a daily basis.

Don’t wait for them to pile up, overwhelm you or allow things to get missed or forgotten about. Stay on top of paperwork and feel a lot more organized overall.

10. Write it down!

When you try to remember and keep track of things in your head, it can often lead to a lot of mental clutter and mental weight you’re carrying around with you all the time.

A great way to reduce mental clutter and the mental load of everything you’re trying to remember and keep track of is simply writing it down! Free up space in your brain for what you’re working on right now, not everything you’re trying to remember.

Writing things down makes it easier to remember and keep track of things, stay more organized and avoid missing or forgetting things.

You can write things down on paper or digitally, whichever works best for you. But the key is getting it out of your head so you don’t have to continue carrying it around with you.

Keep your notes organized so you can find them when you need them and truly let go of the mental load. Having a centralized notebook for all your notes might be a good system if you use pen and paper. Or using a notetaking app organized by category or date if you use digital notes.

11. Manage your time well

Another important aspect of learning how to organize your life is managing your time well and using your time wisely.

When you focus on doing your most important priorities first, you free up time to rest and enjoy your leisure time without guilt or tasks hanging over your head.

There will always be more to do. But having your to-do list prioritized lets you know what’s enough to do for today.

It can also be helpful to identify and limit time-wasting activities that aren’t adding a lot of value back to your life. And instead, use your time wisely for the things that matter most to you. Both work and play related!

How to organize your life

I hope the habits and tips in today’s post give you some great ideas of ways you can start feeling more organized in your life.

Remember, you don’t have to start doing all of these things at once. Start with one new habit, then add another when it feels manageable. Consistency is key when building new habits. So, keep practicing each habit until it feels natural and easy to keep up with.

What’s a habit you have that helps you feel more organized? Leave a comment and let me know!