Maintaining organization is crucial! Your to-go kits or your laptop bag are only useful if you know how to (and actually do) maintain them. Here are some simple ideas to make sure your car or mobile workspace stay nice and tidy!
Digital Nomads
Purge your backpack: If you’re a hot-desker or use a coworking space, it’s best to pack light. But over time, paperwork, notes, and sticky notes can add up to a lot of clutter. I recommend that you purge your backpack, satchel, or laptop bag on a regular basis. If you let it go too long, purging might seem like a big task, but having a regular schedule keeps the task very manageable. Whether it’s once weekly or twice a month, keep track of when you purge your mobile workspace so you know when it’s time to get it all out and see what needs to go.
Have a home for everything: Decide where each item goes in your bag, and stick to it. If you keep your pens in the front pocket, make sure you put them back there when you’re done with them. Having a home for each item means that when it’s time to do a purge, you know where to put everything back. It’s much easier to find things when you need them, too!
Your car is an extension of your home, and many of the same rules apply when it comes to organization. You want to limit clutter, have a home for each item, and (most importantly) you want the space to be functional.
But the car is used for so many different tasks, it can be difficult to figure out what should stay, and what should go. You need different things when you go grocery shopping than you do on your way to the office, but how do you fit everything in at once?
The short answer is: you don’t!
A multi-use space
I recommend that my clients think of their car as a multi-use space, and just like any multi-use area in your home or office, it needs to be kept clean, tidy, and organized to be functional. Think about the different ways you use your car. Do you use it to go on grocery runs? Do you need to take the kids to and from school?
I’ll go into this in more detail next week, but the best way to make your car a multi-use space is to create to-go kits containing items that you need in specific situations. Instead of cramming everything you might need into your car at once, take just what you need with you when you go. And have a home for those kits in your garage or an easy to access closet so you can grab-and-go.
If you’ve put in the effort to organize your life and home, it’s worth knowing how to keep it that way. Knowing how to stay organized keeps the clutter from coming back. Instead of doing a total overhaul of your house once it gets unmanageable, you can use the power of habits to do small bits of work on a routine basis. That’s much less stressful!
Use these techniques to build and maintain habits, and create an organized life!
Non-negotiable Habits
First, you must decide which habits you’d like to incorporate into your life. What daily or weekly tasks are necessary to keep your home organized? These are your non-negotiable habits.
In addition to keeping your home organized, it’s important to take care of you, too! If you’re run down and not feeling your best, it makes it that much harder to take care of anything or anyone else. I’ve come up with 8 non-negotiable habits to build a healthy life.
Get up at the same time each morning to start the day off right.
Practice self care, like meditation and exercise.
Make your bed. It matters!
Eat well, incorporating healthy foods into your diet.
Express love to the people in your life. That helps everyone!
Clear the decks before the end of the day so you’re ready for tomorrow.
Relax into a bedtime ritual, like reading a book or listening to guided meditation.
Sleep at least 7-8 hours a night! Lack of sleep affects all areas of life.
I love easy-to-follow systems that let you organize anywhere. No two homes or businesses are the same, and over the years I’ve relied on the I CARE system to help clients get and stay organized. You can use it anywhere–homes, businesses–wherever there is stuff!
Before we start talking about how to organize your home, you first want to understand what you actually want. The building blocks of creating and maintaining an organized home are lifestyle, mindset, and momentum.
Having an organized home isn’t a one-and-done project. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of TV shows where a crew comes into a messy home, removes everything, sets it up, and leaves. This may seem appealing to you–many people are overwhelmed at the thought of going through their belongings, making a decision about each item, and then maintaining an organized home. Wouldn’t it be easier to have someone just come in and do it for you?
The problem with one-and-done organizing is that it doesn’t help you build new habits. Your home might look nice right then, but if the way someone else organized your things doesn’t suit you, and you don’t know how to keep it organized, the clutter will come right back. It’s a learned skill and one that anyone can learn. And there is nothing wrong with using an organizing service like Organize to Excel to help you with that on a regular basis. An organized home is much easier to keep that way!
Organizing business paperwork takes dedication and consistency, but once you have systems in place and you (and your employees) use them, it becomes a routine part of business life. Here are my ways to make organizing business paperwork go more smoothly.
Shred it and forget it
When paperwork is past its “keep until” date, shred it if it has personal information. If you have a small business you may be fine with a small shredder. For larger business, there are also services like Shred-It that pick up shreddable materials and turn them into recycled paper.
New year, new folders
At the beginning of your financial year, create new folders you can use throughout the year. Keep in mind the 5-20 rule! Any folder with fewer than 5 items in it should be combined with another, and any folder with more than 20 should be subdivided into other folders. This streamlines searching for documents, saving you time and money!
