We recently launched our new 2022-2023 18-month planners, and we asked our community on Instagram to share their best tips for staying organized. We were overwhelmed by the positive response and the number of tips that we had never thought of! Here are some of our favourites to help you stay on top of important tasks to achieve your goals:
- Start your day by just dumping all the tasks on paper, so that your brain is free to work better!
- Create three lists: one for tasks to accomplish midterm, one for weekly tasks and one for daily tasks.
- Use sticky notes to plot in important reminders, so when you are planning your week, you know to look for those notes.
- Write down how long you need for each task so you know exactly how much time you have left.
- Focus on urgent and important tasks. Set all the other combos aside.
- Sometimes you succeed with organizing everything, sometimes you fail. What matters is that you keep trying over and over again.
- Divide your tasks into work, school and household.
- Use a set time in the week to plan your week ahead.
- Plan only one week at a time.
- Create a colour coding with pens, post-its and flags so schedules can be easily read at a glance and habits can be tracked in seconds.
- Write down your feelings and thoughts to keep your mind clear to focus on what is important.
- Embrace the erasable pen. Plans change too much for regular ink.
- “Do the do!” Plan it, write it… do it!
- Actually use the fancy planners and diaries you buy.
- Time boxing is a good tool to balance work and me-time and organize all around.
- Write a list with all the tasks to complete that day, no matter how small. Then do a little bit every day so you don’t feel overwhelmed and tick them off as you go about your day – it really motivates you to complete all the tasks.
- Always take time each morning to write a to-do list and review what you didn’t get done the day before.
- Keep your planner near you and write down appointments as soon as you get them.
- Limit your goals for the week to your top three priorities, all of which aim to move you closer to larger, more long-term goals.
- Have a separate notebook for brain dumps of all your ideas, interests, to-dos, goals. Then organize them by priority: what needs to be done now or today, tomorrow, later this week, or later this month, or long term. Then transfer these to your planner. At the end of each day, week, month, review your progress. See what has been successful and repeat those for future endeavors. Review your failures as well and learn from them what you can do differently or better next time.
- If you think of a task you need to do, write it down before you forget it.
- Always give yourself a couple of days to do a task even if you believe it would only take a few hours. You never know how you’ll feel that day, and giving yourself some leeway can make a world of difference!
- Use stickers, washi tape and sticky tabs for important dates/information.
- Revise your to-do list frequently and cull the items that no longer matter. No reason to be busy for the sake of busyness after all.
- Look at your planner regularly!
- Be in harmony with your biological clock, noting whether you are more productive in the morning or in the evening.
- To keep motivated, just plan one additional task every day to reach one bigger goal.
- Start your to-do list with small tasks and build it up!
- Take five or ten minutes each night before you go to bed to dump everything in your mind onto a piece of paper – reminders, appointments, any random message you forgot to reply to, even the TV show you want to watch at the end of the day. Just writing down everything that pops into your head will leave your mind feeling less cluttered, meaning you sleep better and have a more productive day the next day!
- Have a planner that sparks joy for you and gets you all excited to start the day.
Have you tried any of these tips? Let us know how they worked out.
