31 Words to Create an Organized Life

A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More

Marcia Zina Mager

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781577313991
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

Books about organizing the clutter that plagues most people can be as daunting as the clutter itself. 31 Words to Organize Your Life streamlines this process to its essence by tapping the power of a single word. Drawing from a variety of spiritual traditions, ancient wisdom, and contemporary psychologists, the book helps readers uncover and cultivate their own hidden powers of focus, determination, and concentration to eliminate clutter in their lives. Each entry includes a single word, an accompanying essay, along with three thoughtful tips or exploratory questions, plus an affirmation or meditation. Whether the challenge is in time management, office clutter, or disorganized closets, 31 Words to Organize Your Life shows how to harness the power of a single word to transform a project — and a life — from the inside out. Designed for portability, the book helps even the most disorganized person conjure peace and order from chaos.

SECTION III

Schedule

Effortlessly Managing the Flow of Time

“An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.”
—BONNIE FRIEDMAN

Organizing your day is not all that different from organizing your closet. In fact, time management expert Julie Morgenstern writes in her bestseller Time Management from the Inside Out, “Just as a closet is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of objects, a schedule is a limited space into which you must fit a limited number of tasks. Your days are not infinite and endless. When you think of it this way, time is not so intangible and elusive. In fact, each day is simply a container, a storage unit that has a definite capacity you can reach.” So grab your watch, because it’s time now for us to get curious (and brave) about meeting that frantic white rabbit that lives within us all-you know, the one with the giant pocket watch who hops around shouting, “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date!” With the strategies and advice from our experts, we’ll have our inner white rabbits arriving happily on time after all!

Value

Respecting Yourself and Defining
What Makes You Tick

Amy was a busy mother and part-time bookkeeper. When she was single, she loved spending time in museums and taking yoga classes. But ever since she became a mother, those things seem to drift away. Every New Year’s Eve she promised herself she’d sign up for a class that inspired her. But whenever her kids or husband wanted something or her employer needed something, Amy felt obliged to give every ounce of herself. One afternoon, after working extra hours at the office, she raced off to pick up the kids at school because her husband had promised a colleague he’d play a round of golf. She drove the kids to soccer practice, then got home late and frantically made dinner. By the time her husband walked in at 7:00 p.m., Amy snapped. “I never get to do what I want!” Bursting into tears, she stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door, feeling angry and deeply unappreciated. She spent a long time thinking about what really mattered to her in life. Family was important, to be sure, but she also deeply valued her creative spirit and spiritual side. Yet whenever she had the chance to sign up for classes, she would talk herself out of it. Then and there, she began writing a mission statement for herself—something that reflected who she really was and what really mattered to her. Now it would be easier, she thought, to evaluate and make decisions about all the choices that life presented.

Whether you’re having a good day or a bad day, one thing remains constant: With only 168 hours in every week, your time is limited. And how you spend those fleeting seconds (86,400 in a day) greatly impacts the quality of your inner and outer life. As time management expert Harold Taylor points out, “We cannot manage time. Nor can we save it. Time ticks away relentlessly in spite of our efforts to control it. We can use it wisely or we can waste it.”

Barry Izsak sums it up this way: “Time management is about self-management.” And self-management, these experts agree, begins with defining your own unique values. “Values underlie what’s truly important to us,” says life coach Natalie Gahrmann, author of Succeeding as a Super Busy Parent.

“When you become really clear about what’s important to you, you can live your life consciously based on that. Because life is so busy, we don’t really take the time to reflect on what’s really and truly most important to us.”

The first step in navigating through our stormy or calm 168-hour week is understanding what makes us tick, what drives our life, what’s most important to us. “When you’re clear on your values,” says Gahrmann, “they serve as a guide-post in your decision making.” The essence of effective time management is about making the best decisions you can, every single day, based on your deepest values.

In addition to clarifying our values, we also need to value our own time. Too many of us live our lives like Amy, ignoring what’s important, and disrespecting our time. “By valuing your time,” says Gahrmann, “you’re valuing yourself. If you don’t value your time, nobody else will.” How do you know if you’re valuing your time? “You feel respected and appreciated,” says Gahrmann. “You don’t feel resentful of other people and you don’t feel taken advantage of.”

Gahrmann believes that it’s equally important to value others’ time. “When someone says “enough,” we need to respect that. The problem is that we don’t. We keep pushing and cajoling and trying to persuade them, because we ourselves are so overwhelmed.”

Since we don’t have infinite hours and we want to live the best life we can, we need to take some of that precious time to genuinely respect ourselves—and offer that same respect to others. And we need to recognize what underlying values drive us. Once we begin to do that, we can more easily make decisions that reflect those core values. If writing a novel is really important to you, then the next time you have to choose between an all-day party at the house of someone you barely know or staying home to rewrite a chapter, you’ll make a wiser choice based on your deepest desire.

Contemplate the quality of how you spend your time. Do you ever feel angry or resentful? If so, that’s a clue that perhaps you’re undervaluing yourself and your time. In order to get clearer on your values around time, make two lists: “The top ten things I really want to do” (focusing especially on things you rarely or never do that you would enjoy). And “The top ten things I don’t want to do that I do too much.” Once you have a list of what you’d like to do more often, schedule fifteen to thirty minutes every day this week to enjoy one of these activities. It could be as simple as sitting in a garden, reading a chapter of a novel, painting your toenails, or playing the guitar. Also this week, play with writing a personal mission statement based on your values. It can be as simple as “I want to live a life filled with adventure and excitement,” or “I want to be peaceful, surrounded by the people and things that I love.” Your mission statement, which can continually change or expand, simply acts as a lighthouse, guiding you closer to your heartfelt desires.

Prioritize

Deciding What’s Important

Thomas, a time management expert who loved giving presentations at conferences once delivered his message to a group of business people in a unique way. He placed a big jar on a table in front of the audience. Then he took out a bag of large rocks. One by one, he put the large rocks into the jar until the jar was filled up. “Is it full?” he asked his audience. They all shouted, “Yes.” He then pulled out a bag of gravel and dumped it in the jar. “Is it full now?” he asked again. The audience shouted, “Yes” for a second time. Smiling, he hauled out a bucket of fine sand and began pouring it into the jar, filling up all the empty spaces. “How about now?” he asked, “Is it full?” By now the audience caught on. “No!” they shouted back. He pulled out a glass pitcher of water and slowly emptied it into the jar. When he was done, he asked, “What’s the point of all this? What’s the message?” A young executive eagerly replied, “We can always fit more things into our schedules no matter how busy we are!” The audience laughed, nodding in agreement, but Thomas shook his head. “No,” he said, lifting the jar packed with rocks, gravel, sand, and water. “The point to all this is that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never fit them in at all.”

Barry Izsak wholeheartedly agrees. “Every time you do something unimportant,” he says, “you are trading something important for it.” Prioritizing means looking at the “big rocks” and making time and space for them in our busy day.

“We cannot do every thing,” reminds Harold Taylor. “It is a life of choices. We must choose those activities that will have the greatest positive impact on our life. . . . Set goals for your personal life as well as your business or work and the priorities will become obvious.”

If you’re not sure if something is a priority or not, Taylor has the following suggestion: “Ask yourself what the result would be if you failed to do it. If the consequence would be negligible, it’s probably not a priority. If it would do nothing to further a goal, it’s probably not a priority.”

Author Lee Silber says, “The most important time management tool is a to-do list.” Many time management experts suggest using a to-do list and a master list concurrently. The master list is the overview and serves as a guide. You create it based on your values and goals, and put in everything you want to accomplish in all the areas of your life—career, finances, relationships, self-care, travel, and so on. Creating a master list first can help ensure that your daily to-do lists are helping you get closer to your larger life goals.

To make an effective to-do list, remember not to fill it with a hundred tasks that can’t be accomplished in a day. Silber explains that “People make long lists that are impossible to do in one day. When they don’t get it done, they feel terrible about themselves.” He suggests using your master list to help you create a daily to-do list, by breaking down your overarching goals into what he calls “micro-movements: small incremental easy simple daily things to get you there.” This way you always have a sense of moving forward, especially if you take on at least one difficult task every day.

If there’s a large and difficult task that you want to accomplish, some experts suggest using the “Swiss cheese method,” in which you poke holes in the task by doing small pieces of it in any order. This helps you enjoy the task and can head off procrastination and feelings of being overwhelmed.

If you’re a right-brained sort, Silber suggests that your to-do list doesn’t have to be in a linear form. “It can be three piles left on a desk—that’s the same as writing it down on a list. It can be doodles or a stack of post-its.” As you make your to-do list for the day, allow yourself to find the method that intuitively works for you.

Take some time this week to create your master list. List all of your “big rocks”—the ultimate goals in all the major areas of your life. Then take these goals, break them down into small doable steps, and set a realistic time frame for completing each step. Pick a target date for each of your smaller goals. Each day, before making your daily to-do list, briefly scan this master list and allow it to inform your priorities for the day. Once you have your short daily to-do list, rank each activity in order of importance.

Plan

Structuring and Implementing Your Day

Before I began writing this book, I actually used three different calendars: a large one on the wall in my kitchen by the phone so I could schedule things when people called; another one in my home office; and a third purse-sized daily planner I carried with me almost every day. One morning I realized I was in trouble when the birthday party my son had been invited to (scribbled on the kitchen calendar) ended up being on the same afternoon as both a dentist’s appointment (scheduled in my portable calendar) and a phone meeting (scrawled on my office calendar). Yikes! I knew I needed a better system to manage my busy life.

Every expert I interviewed for this book agreed that when it comes to sophisticated calendar systems and daily planners, a...