Day 5 – 30 Days of Positive Life-Enhancing Habits Challenge

While the absent-minded professor is a thing of literature, the truth is, statistically, if you want to be successful, you need to get organized. Now organization does not have to look the same for you as it does someone else, but it does mean you need to pay close attention to whether or not your environment is working to help you or not.

Here is the blog post that explores this idea of developing the habit of organizing your environment.

When it comes to daily habits that breed success, being organized can’t be understated. Getting your environment organized and keeping it that way will pay off in big ways

Some people experience issues with being organized isn’t due to having some organizational block, but it’s more about not really understanding that there are better ways to get organized for success than just putting things away and being uncluttered.  

Here are some ways to think about organization so that your entire environment is set up to make success easy for you, whether at home or work.

Use Your Planner – Whether you use electronic or paper versions, you can’t beat incorporating the habit of using a planner into your daily life to help you be more successful. When you have it all in one place, you can easily look at your days, weeks, months, and years and make the best use of that time. Don’t rely on memory. Write everything down you want to do and block out the time to do it.

Set Goals Properly – Make it a habit to set up your goals properly to what steps are necessary to be successful and how long it will take to do them. For example, if you want to start making money from your podcast, don’t just start podcasting; take the time to plan your podcast, plan your marketing, and plan each action you need to take to make it all work

Make Daily Lists – From your planner the night before take a look and make a list of actions you will take tomorrow to achieve what’s in your planner. Organize the list with the top 3 priorities on the top and be willing to move anything after three to the next day

Create Activity Zones – Whether home or office, the best way to organize is to set up activity zones. Putting everything away every time is a roadblock that will stop you from doing more. If you want to bake cookies, you shouldn’t have to redo your entire kitchen for an hour, and you should be able to go over to the baking zone and start within five minutes. The same thing if you’re writing a novel, if you have a writing area set up and ready to go, you can simply move to that writing zone and get it done during the block of time you set aside to do it

Have a Place for Everything – Spending time creating the right storage and space to do the things you want to do will help a lot. It’s hard to get motivated to do much when the tools you’re using aren’t right, or the space you’re doing it in isn’t set up right. Spend the time and money investing in setting up your space to do what you want to do in it

Be Consistent – No one wants to spend four hours cleaning a cluttered room and area on Saturday. Instead, make it a habit to consistently pick up and clean as you go so that you never have to do that. If you set up routines for each time of day where you habitually do certain behaviors, you won’t need any willpower. Check out flylady.com for some prewritten cleaning and organizing routines you can copy.

If you make it a habit to clear up right away and set up things for the next time, right away – you’ll experience a lot less procrastination and get a lot more done. Your productivity will increase exponentially just by simple organizational practices each day. The great thing is that most of it will become a habit quickly because the payoff is fast.