5 Tools for Keeping Yourself Organized Throughout the Day
Why it’s important to structure your day
Every day when we wake up, we have a certain number of hours in the day to complete everything that needs to get done. For some, there isn’t much of a need to plan those minutes. They like to go with the flow and see where the day takes them. Different times in life call for different techniques. A retiree is much more likely to benefit from a “go with the flow” style of moving through the day, than a young professional or a new set of parents.
As a college student, I was a “go with the flow” type of student, and that worked well for me. If I had a paper due, I wouldn’t structure the paper ahead of time, or even break it into several different sessions. I always waited until a few days before, checked out some books from the library, studied a bit writing down some quotes, and then would write the paper in one sitting. This usually happened at 3 or 4 in the morning and probably wasn’t great for my health, but it worked well at the time.
Better Boundaries=More Success
Fast forward to today. I’m careening toward the joys of fatherhood and have a job that I enjoy. It would be much more difficult if I operated in the same way I did in college. One philosophy that has changed in my adult life is how I view individual freedom. Not from a political perspective, but from a personal perspective. With tight boundaries, there is no creativity and spontaneity.
With no boundaries, you run the risk of losing control of things. If you were on an island with cliffs on all four corners, the ideal situation is to have a fence bordering the cliff. Too small of a fence and you miss out on green pastures and adventure. But if there is no fence, you run the risk of falling off the cliff, especially on a cloudy day. When life is toughest, it’s most important to have those boundaries. I have several islands such as my moral island, and my emotional island. The island I am discussing today though is the organizational island.
Going back to the beginning of this post, there are only a finite number of hours in each day. There are only a finite number of days in your life. It’s important to make every moment count for something. It doesn’t need to be productive by any means, just meaningful. Below is a list of things that I recommend using to make your life just that much more yours.
Also, check out this post on creating that structure and finding peace at the same time!
Journal
Journaling is a topic I’m sure to cover in future posts, but wanted to first touch upon it here. The best journal is one that is not too expensive. A lot of people try to get you to buy their specific journal, but for me, the best has always been the simplest. When it comes to planners, the different planner styles make sense, but having more than just a blank canvas for a journal isn’t great for getting your thoughts down.
Journaling could be writing, but it could also be drawing, doodling, or even doing some basic math to keep yourself sharp. The key is to get into a rhythm with it. Some journal daily, others a few times per week. One thing I always do when I journal is write down three things for which I am grateful. It helps me put my life into perspective and thank my creator for everything that I have.
My favorite company for journals is Northbooks. They have an entire amazon store, but this is my favorite notebook. You can also use the journal to plan out your day. For example, I list out all of my meetings and tasks for the day and check them off as they happen. This is especially helpful during meetings. On the left side of a spread, I usually have my tasks and meetings and on the right side, I generally keep notes from my meetings. This allows me to check back on a particular day and see exactly what was spoken about in a particular meeting along with any action items from the meeting. In conjunction with my calendar (which I’ll touch on below), my journal helps me to keep myself organized at the office and at home.
Screen Time
In the classic Mac vs IBM battle, I grew up a firm IBMee. Windows and Linux PCs have been my bread and butter for a long time. So naturally when all of my friends were getting iPhones, I went the other direction and bought an Android phone. It was an HTC 3D and it was my first smartphone. Since then, I’ve had several different Android phones, but a few years back, I regretfully made the switch to iPhone.
I made the switch for a variety of reasons. I had been used to rooting my Android phones and playing with them, setting them up exactly how I wanted. What I realized as I aged is that I no longer wanted to put that effort into a phone. Computers to me are different. I need the processing power to edit for work that a PC will give me for a quarter of the cost of a new Mac.
I also like to play video games on my PC and Macs are generally not video game friendly. My phone is a different story though, since I don’t spend a lot of time on the device, and I really only use it to text, make phone calls, navigate, and listen to music. When I made the switch, another technology surfaced in Apple devices that I believed would be better for my overall productivity.
Stay in the Moment
Screen time has been invaluable in my life for keeping me in the moment. Never the type to use my phone at dinner or anything, I still frequently looked at it as a placeholder for being bored. As children, we are used to being bored, and it allows our brain to slow down and process things we have learned or things we are experiencing at a particular moment in time. With the advent of the smartphone, people have lost that sense of boredom, instead scrolling endlessly through social media when their minds are not occupied by something else.
At first, it’s definitely awkward at times. Most people are looking down at their devices, so you feel almost left out. Over time though, you start to pay attention to other things in your surroundings that you may not have noticed before. The birds chirping, the sun hitting a puddle a certain way, the different types of people in the grocery store.
Screentime is built into iPhones, and I think it’s perhaps the thing that sets them apart from other operating systems.
Backpack
Looking back at the pandemic, backpacks have been one of the most valuable items for organization. So many employees were sent home the second week in March of 2020 with nothing but their laptops and a prayer. In my role, I helped with communication, and we couldn’t go back to the office at all for quite some time. As restrictions began to ease, more and more employees started to return to the office a couple of days per week, or when it was necessary. At the time, I had three different backpacks. They were cluttering my tiny apartment, and I was using one for work, one for my hikes, and another as a city pack.
The Best Backpack for Daily Use
In an effort to become more organized and less cluttered, I decided to pick up a new backpack and give the old ones to Goodwill. I consolidated all of my packs into the Osprey Talon 22 and I will never look back. The only item that I carry all the time is a small first aid kit that I compiled from a variety of Appalachian Trail backpacking forums.
My work equipment is in a Hefty gallon bag that I put into the backpack along with my laptop if I’m going to the office. This small bag has things like my charger, mouse, and some SD cards. When I want to go for a hike or head into the city, I’ll just replace the contents with what I need for the day and I am all set. In some capacity, I use the bag nearly every day, and my life would be much more chaotic without something in which to carry it.
Online Calendar
Another tool that is critical to keeping yourself well organized is some kind of online calendar. The two most popular calendars are the Outlook calendar and the iCloud calendar, and personally those are what I use to keep myself well organized. If you have a large volume of meetings, you are well aware of how much your calendar gets booked and as a result, the work that you need to get done either doesn’t get done or gets pushed to the backburner. The best remedy for this is a strict calendar during the week, and a rough calendar for the weekends.
Let’s first break into Outlook which is easily the most used email platform in corporate America. Outlook has the option to break calendar events into categories.
Take a look at your events, meetings, and tasks that need to get done. Create categories, and put these types of events and meetings into those categories. Then, at the beginning of the week, set a maximum of three major tasks to complete per day and put them into their respective categories as all day events where your status is set to “free.”
Importance of Completing Everything
Other things will inevitably come up, but you must make a point to complete everything on your calendar for that day. If you can’t get those tasks done, then there is tool much for set for that day and you need to re-prioritize and communicate with key stakeholders. If you are super strapped for time and have back to back meetings a week or two out, then it would make sense to further segment this strategy into individual times by blocking off time on the calendar as “busy time” to make sure you get those tasks completed.
In iCloud, it’s very similar. I use my iCloud calendar for my bills, events, and important birthdays, all broken into different color categories. I will go over my budgeting structure in a future blog post, so focusing on events, I just add a calendar item for the general day of something. If there is a specific time, I add the time (such as a tee time), but most of the time, I just make them all day events. This allows me to take a wide look at my calendar and tends to make my weekends more spontaneous. This calendar also syncs with my wife’s calendar, making it easy for us to plan weekend getaways or dinners with our friends or family.
Watch
Finally, I’ll talk about a critical piece of hardware that I use on a daily basis. I own and wear a Garmin Forerunner 45 smartwatch. It’s an excellent smartwatch and does everything I need. It tracks my workouts and runs (motivating me to keep in track with my fitness goals), but it also connects to my phone. This allows for notifications, calendar syncing, and weather which is helpful for planning my days and keeping myself organized.
While I have a smartwatch, I used a normal watch throughout my whole life. The reason the last tool is a watch and not a smartwatch is because while the other organizational aspects of smartwatches are great, the number one action I need my watch to do, is tell the time. Keeping to a schedule requires impeccable time management skills. All of the above tools are practically useless without this. While a lot of people rely on their smartphones for telling the time, that requires pulling the phone out every time you need to check the time which would get distracting and take you away from the moment.
My Favorite Normal Watch
A perfect watch that I used for a long time was just a standard Timex watch. The Timex proves that you don’t need to spend a ton of money on a watch. All normal watches do the same thing, and there isn’t a need to spend $5,000 on a watch that just tells time. Not to say there is no value in those expensive watches, but for the sake of organization, a cheap Timex will do just fine.
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