A guest post from Alice in Sheffield, a popular blogger you might like to check out.

After what has felt like a lifetime indoors due to the pandemic, England is slowly returning to a level of normality, this is probably leading to your diary and calendar filling up a lot quicker again which can become overwhelming. Now is the perfect time to implement organisation hacks and easy ways to organise your day. Getting that work-life balance sorted can change so much.

What do I need to be organised?

The first step to having an easy organised life is the set-up. You need to decide the best method for you, some people prefer to have a physical diary for a schedule whereas others forget to use a physical diary so have a much better time using virtual methods such as calendars or to-do lists. 

You also need to decide what your idea of organised is, are you just looking to complete daily tasks more effectively? Or are you wanting to target specific goals (I have a diary for my 101 in 1001 goals list to help me stay on track) or even starting a manifestation journal. You can even combine the three if it helps you keep on track.

However, you decide to organise your day whether physical or virtual or your ultimate need for organisation the following hacks will make organising your day so much easier.

Time Blocking

There seems to be a fascination with multi-tasking that can often lead to procrastination and burnout. You push yourself SO hard to complete SO many tasks that ultimately none of your tasks gets completed and you end up with half-finished tasks and no feeling of completion or satisfaction. Time blocking is perfect for you if you’re the kind of person that flits from task to task – it’s the notion of allocating each task you need completing a whole block of time to complete.

First of all, you need to decide on your important tasks that are an absolute must to be completed for the day, I recommend time blocking in an evening for the day ahead so you wake up already knowing what your plan for the day is. Be realistic with your time blocks, if you know a task will take a while give yourself a larger block to stay on task. If you do manage to finish a block early then move onto your next block, you could find yourself with some free time at the end of the day with all your planned tasks completed

Visual To Do Lists

If you’re a visual person then a list might not always be the best way to stay organised so make your to-do list visual. There’s a method adopted in IT called Kanban, which in its simplest form can help you easily organise your day. This method works best for those tasks which need more than one step (for example doing the washing is a longer task as you need to wash the clothes, dry the clothes, and put them away so it’s not a simple tick and done.) 

Create your Kanban board using sticky notes or a virtual app such as Trello. A simple board will have three columns with a to-do, doing and complete task. This helps you visualise what tasks you already have in progress and which you could progress through to complete quickly. The best part of a Kanban visual board is you can keep adding tasks as they come up and the satisfaction of seeing your complete column filling up will make you realise just how organised you have become

Bullet Journaling 

A bullet journal is a really fancy to-do list, the best thing about bullet journaling is it is completely designed by you to fit your needs. There are hundreds of Pinterest boards and Facebook groups for inspiration if you’re the creative type. Bullet journaling allows you to incorporate a time blocked calendar or a visual to-do list if you prefer those methods, but most importantly it gives you somewhere to brain dump all of the tasks you need to get completed. Seeing tasks written down can really help motivate you to get stuff done. I’d recommend writing your tasks out on a Monday what you want to get completed and each day pick a top three to complete. Once you’ve done your top three, then find the next most important task and keep going ticking them off as you go. 

One piece of advice for whichever method you choose to organise your day is to complete your simple tasks. You can sit pondering and thinking about your tasks all day, if they will take less than five minutes to complete then get them done. Set yourself a timer for 30 minutes and get as many niggly little tasks completed first thing in the morning to really set you up for a well organised day

How do you stay on track and organised during your day?