Your "To Do" List is Overwhelming

Getting things done requires organization. You need a goal and a plan for completing your "task". 

Even things as simple as "grocery shopping" or "picking up painting supplies so that you can paint your living room" are tasks that should be scheduled - so that they actually happen. Making a list of what you need to get done each day helps you stay on track and makes sure that you don't forget something important.

In our busy lives - sometimes we just forget things! It happens.....  

Having a "To Do" list is great - BUT - for a lot of people - it's ovewhelming. And there is a difference between a "Daily To Do" list and a "running To Do" list. 

A lot of people (especially homeowners) have some type of a running list of things that they need to get done - to fix - to buy - to pick up - to drop off .....  And that list can be very, very long. It's basically a "brain dump" of anything and everything that they want to (or think they want to) accomplish. The list can be pages and pages long. Some people call it a "honey do" list.

The problem of overwhelm comes in when someone looks at that list and thinks that they have to get everything done in one day - or be labeled as a "failure". If you have 10 things on your list and you only accomplish 2 or 3 items on your list - you are a "failure" - according to your psyche. 

A "Daily To Do" list should only contain a few (3 - 5) items. They should be things that you can realistically accomplish in your day. If you accomplish 3 out of 5 items - then you can consider it a success.  But if you had 10 items on your list - only accomplishing 3 items would have been considered a failure.

You want to set yourself up for success - by being realistic in what you can accomplish given your time constraints. 

Each day (either the first thing in the morning or the previous night) - you want to take a look at your "running to do" list - and pick a few items to put on your "daily to do" list.

Set yourself up for success - keep your daily list short and your overwhelm under control.

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

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Decisions to be Made Before You Organize

When some people decide that they want to organize their home - they just start "organizing". They go out and buy some bins and baskets and put random things into these bins without having made some very important decisions.

Such as:

What am I trying to accomplish?

Do I have a specific place for this item to go?

Do I really want or need this item?

Do I have room for this item?

Is this item in good shape - or does it work or fit?

And one very important question that not a lot of people think about ---

    What is the intended use of this room?

You don't start the "organizing process" by organizing - you start the process by decluttering first!

Start by picking up any trash (wrappers or other things thrown on the floor or left out instead of in the garbage).

Next - do a quick pick up of things that don't belong in the room and remove them from the room (anything on a kitchen island or dining room table that doesn't belong there). 

Doing these two things will make a huge difference immediately.  

But - then you need to take a step back and decide what it is that you actually want to accomplish. And you also need to decide what you want each room to function as.

Do you want the living room to be a room where the family watches TV or they play games or the kids do their homework? 

Does your bedroom also need to function as your "office" (since a lot of people might still work from home)?

Do you want your kitchen to also be the place that the kids do their homework or that you use as your "office"?

Is your entryway closet going to be used as a coat closet or as a toy cabinet? It's your home - you get to decide how each room and each space will be used. 

Once you decide how each room and each space will be used - then you need to start the planning process. Unfotunately, this is the step that most people skip over. Take your time and come up with a list of things that you migth need to make your project a success. This will save you time so that you aren't constantly running to the store or to different rooms to get something that you need. Get everything in place before you start.

Then you need to step back and really think decide if the way you set up the room (or space) is really working for you. If not - you need to figure out why. Move things to other areas or drawers. Consolidate all like items in one place. Whatever it takes to make it function better for you.

Start the organizing process by making these decisions before you start doing any organizing! 

Good Luck and Happy Organizing!

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

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Breaking Bad Habits: Planning for Setbacks

Having a home that is decluttered and organized takes a lot of work. It starts with a vision of what you want your home to look like. And then you need to create a plan on how to get there.

But for a lot of people – it also starts with breaking their “bad habits” (unlearning them) and learning “new habits”. Something as simple as not dropping your coat and backpack on the floor when you walk into your house – and putting it into a designated spot instead.

Once you have decided that you want to make changes to your home and life – people tend to go full speed ahead – usually without a plan – and then come to a grinding halt when things don’t go as fast as they thought they would or they become totally overwhelmed. 

 And then the guilt sets in….

Breaking bad habits can be a challenging and often frustrating process. It can be easy to fall off the wagon and revert to old habits. But it's vital to remember that setbacks are a normal part of the process and can actually be an opportunity for growth and improvement.

Here are several steps you can take to plan for setbacks and get back on track.

Forgive Yourself

It's important to be kind to yourself when you experience a setback. Don't beat yourself up or dwell on the mistake. Instead, recognize that it's a normal part of the process and move on.

Take a Break

Sometimes a setback happens just because you’re overworking yourself. Often you can put things right by going for a walk, or working on something else and coming back to the issue with a clear mind. Planning for frequent breaks will help you minimize the number of setbacks you experience.

Evaluate What Happened

Take some time to reflect on what led to the setback. For example, did you have a particularly stressful day that made it harder to stick to your habits? Did you get caught up in a social situation that made it difficult to resist temptation? Understanding the root cause and triggers surrounding the setback will help you develop strategies to prevent it from happening again.

Set Specific and Achievable Goals

Clear goals keep you focused and motivated as you overcome setbacks. Be sure to set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Be Flexible and Adaptable

Setbacks are a normal part of life. It’s vitally important to be flexible and adaptable in the face of them. If something isn't working, be willing to adjust your plan and try something new.

Find Healthy Coping Mechanisms

Stress majorly contributes to setbacks, so it's imperative to find healthy ways to manage it. Choose healthy options that are proven to work, like exercise, meditation, or talking to a therapist.

Restart

Don't let a setback discourage or derail your progress entirely. Instead, use it as an opportunity to start fresh. Set a new goal and make a plan to achieve it. Don't worry about how long it will take – just focus on taking small steps in the right direction.

Seek Support

It is helpful to have someone to talk to when trying to break a bad habit. A friend or family member who is supportive and understanding can encourage and help you stay motivated. You can also consider joining a support group or working with a coach or therapist to help you overcome your challenges.

Stay Positive

Getting discouraged during a setback is common, but staying positive and focusing on your progress is important. Remember that change takes time, and it's okay to have setbacks along the way.

Planning for setbacks is an important part of breaking bad habits. You can overcome setbacks and progress towards your goals by forgiving yourself, evaluating what happened, restarting, and seeking support. So don't get discouraged – keep moving forward, and you’ll live a better life through positive habits sooner than you think.

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

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Old Habits Are Hard to Break - Accountability Is Key to Beating Procrastination

Beating procrastination can be hard. We do well for a few days, but then old habits set back in, or we get frustrated with our lack of apparent progress. Nothing goes fast enough. If you face a small setback at this point, it may be enough to stop working on what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. Thankfully, there’s something you can do to greatly improve your chances of success. Accountability. 

 

Track Your Progress 

Start by tracking what you do. You can do this via a simple habit tracker or by just using pencil and paper. Use a box for each day of the week, fill in what you want to accomplish each day, Check it off or fill it in when you do the task. Keep tracking it until it becomes a habit or until the project is completed.

For larger projects that you may or may not work on daily, it helps to write down your goal and then break it into milestones. Record your progress and how much closer you’re inching to each of your goals. 

 

Make Daily To-Do Lists 

Write out a list of everything you want to get done for the day. It’s helpful to do this the day before. Play around with how many items you put on that list. You don’t want it to overwhelm you, but you do want to challenge yourself to get more done. The list holds you accountable because you can see in black and white if you procrastinated or not. 

 

Tell Someone About Your Plans 

If there’s something you’ve been struggling to get done, tell someone else about your plans to finally tackle it. Call a friend, tell your spouse, or announce it on social media. Encourage the people you’re sharing with to check back with you on how you did. It may be the little extra push you need to stop procrastinating. 

 

Find An Accountability Buddy 

Last but not least, find someone else who’s procrastinating and start holding each other accountable. This could be as simple as checking in once in the morning to declare what you each want to get done, and then again at the end of the day to see what happened. Knowing someone else is right there with you can be super motivating. 

 

Give each of these procrastination beating strategies a try and see which ones give you the best results. Like anything else, procrastinating is a habit, and you can get out of it and turn yourself into the motivated and productive version of yourself you want to be. 

 

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

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5 Mistakes That Cause New Habits to Fail

In order to be successful - you need to have Goals and a Plan. But sometimes you are your own worst enemy - because of your bad habits. Trying to change your habits takes time and commitment.

It's not easy to develop new healthy and productive habits that you can stick to. But don't give up!

Your habits determine how much money is in your bank account and the size of your waistline. Your habits determine the quality of your life.

It can seem impossible to break bad habits or to create new, positive habits. Most people have an ineffective approach. They try to go cold turkey and rely on willpower to force the necessary changes.

You already know this doesn’t work unless you’re incredibly motivated, and motivation isn’t reliable. It’s here one day and gone the next.

Create new habits more effectively by avoiding the most common mistakes:

1.      Changing too much, too soon. A new habit is best installed in baby steps. If you want to spend two hours each day writing your novel, start with a single sentence each day. One sentence accomplishes something exciting: it gets you in the habit of sitting down and writing when it’s time to write. That’s the most important first step.

·         Start with small changes. Then increase the amount of time and effort when the habit of beginning is in place.

·         Seek behavioral changes that are so easy, you can’t possibly fail.

2.      Relying on self-discipline. If your habit requires self-discipline, it won’t last. At most, self-discipline should only be required to make a habit of getting started. Habits are automatic. Self-discipline isn’t required to eat a candy bar or watch TV for most of us. If you have a habit of going to the gym, self-discipline isn’t required for that either.

·         Self-discipline is a short-term solution.

·         Seek behavioral changes that are so easy, you don’t need self-discipline.

3.      Expecting a new habit to be easy to install. Change isn’t easy. You’ll become complacent and lazy if you expect a new habit to be easy to implement. We’d all be rich, in shape, and speak five languages if creating new habits were a simple matter.

4.      Expecting a new habit to be difficult to install. The opposite is also true. If you expect the process to be exceptionally difficult, you’ll also struggle. The thought of doing anything that’s hard can be sufficient reason to never get started in the first place.

·         New behaviors are easy to implement if you start slowly and have patience. It’s moving ahead slowly and having patience that are difficult.

5.      Relying too much on information. Our society is blessed, or cursed, with access to an excessive amount of information. This can create two challenges:

·         It’s very easy to believe that you don’t know enough to take the first step. There’s always something out there that you don’t know. The need to know everything before getting started can leave you stuck. There’s no prize for knowing the most. There is great success in doing the most, though.

·         The belief that knowledge alone is sufficient is just as harmful. You might know how to do pushups, but that doesn’t provide the same results as doing 100 of them each day.

·         The special forces have a motto that 60% is enough to take action. If you know 60% of the relevant information, you know enough to move forward. You can figure out the other 40% along the way. Spend 90% of your time doing and 10% learning.

Dropping your negative habits and adding new, supportive habits is the key to changing your circumstances. Unfortunately, our instincts about change are incorrect.

Tiny changes are easy to implement and build upon. But this approach requires patience and the belief that it can work. Remember: small changes add up to big results.

Avoid the most common mistakes when attempting to add a new habit to your life and you’ll find greater success in adding habits that make a positive impact on your life.  

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

Organizational Consulting Services

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How to Use Habits to Reach Your Goals

One of the keys to reaching a new goal is to have habits in place that support that goal. If your current habits are counter-productive, you'll need to change them or run the risk of coming up short.

How do habits help you reach your goals?

Suppose you have the goal of running a marathon: if you don’t already have the habit of running regularly, you're unlikely to be successful until you can adopt that habit. Running regularly can help you attain your goal in several ways, including getting you in great physical shape and strengthening your endurance.

Developing supportive habits can be easier than you think and far more powerful than you can imagine!

Identify the Habits You Need

Before you create new, positive habits, you’ll want to figure out which habits will help you attain your goals. For every goal, there are habits that can practically guarantee success. Reflect on your goals and what actions you can take to help bring them about.

Consider these attributes for the habits you want to implement:

1.      Look for daily habits. Habits you practice each day are much easier to put into place and keep than those that are less frequent.

2.      Keep it simple. The more complex the task, the less likely you are to stick with it. If you really do need to implement a complex habit, start with a simpler version and then add more complexity later.

3.      Be specific. It's not enough to just specify what you're going to do; include the how, when, and where as well. Time is always critical when creating a new habit. Be sure to specify a precise period of time in which you wish to implement the new actions.

·         So "I'm going to exercise 1 hour per day" is inadequate. "I'm going to swim from 6-7 am, Monday through Friday at the YMCA" is more like it. This has enough detail to be quite clear about what you want to accomplish and includes the how, when and where.

Prepare for Interference. 

There are usually obstacles to creating new habits and behavioral patterns. Try to figure out these possibilities ahead of time so you can eliminate them as soon as possible.

For example, if you've decided that you're going to eat a healthy breakfast every day, get rid of all the breakfast junk food in your pantry and freezer. That junk food is an obstacle to successfully implementing your habit.

The obstacle might be time interference. Maybe your partner doesn’t usually leave you alone for 30 minutes every night so you can meditate, write, read, or whatever it is you want to do towards your goal. Simply let them know ahead of time that you need be undisturbed during this time.

Look for More Supporting Habits.

When you determine supporting habits that will help you reach your goal, consider going even deeper into the details to find habits that will help you accomplish your other new habits.

For example, if one of your new habits is to make it to the gym every morning by 6:00 am, you can develop several supporting habits to help you establish this habit, such as:

·         Get out of bed by 5:15 am.

·         In order to get up at 5:15 am each day, you might need an additional habit of always being in bed by 10:00 pm.

·         Another supporting habit might be to pack your gym bag the night before.

These supporting habits are monumentally important. Take time to think about what additional habits you can develop to support your efforts.

Enjoy Automatic Success.

Once an action becomes a habit, you’ll do it automatically, without having to make the decision to do it each time. In other words, you’ll automatically move forward, day after day, toward achieving your goal until you reach it.

Just as counter-productive habits can keep you from success, supportive habits can practically guarantee your victory. So consider the habits that will best support your goals, put them into action on a daily basis, and enjoy your new success!  

Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

Organizational Consulting Services

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How to Gain Laser Focus in a World Full of Distractions

Our ability to focus has been reduced dramatically. We’ve never had more distractions to deal with. And as disheartening as it sounds, many of the distractions we face were engineered to be as distracting as possible.

Our brains quickly become addicted to these distractions and our ability to focus on important work suffers.

Learning how to focus is a vital skill if you want to be productive and successful.

Overcome the distractions in your life and get things done with these strategies:

    1. Single-tasking beats multitasking. Avoid fooling yourself. You’ll get more done and feel more relaxed if you focus on a single task at a time. It’s not easy for your brain to switch back and forth between different things. Set your priorities and complete them in order.

    2. Do deep focus activities early in the day. Your ability to focus deeply is greatest in the morning and decreases throughout the day. A few people also do well late at night if their day isn’t too demanding.

        ◦ Schedule your more demanding mental tasks earlier in the day. Save the simpler items for later when your focus is weaker.

    3. Practice focusing. You can’t be good at something you don’t practice. It’s harder to focus deeply than you think.

        ◦ Try setting a timer for 15 minutes and keep your attention entirely on performing a task. Notice how stray thoughts constantly interfere. Notice how strong the urge to check your email, text messages, social media becomes.

        ◦ Over time, you’ll be able to focus for longer periods of time before you need a break.

    4. Remove distractions. Make life easier for yourself by removing as many distractions as possible. Put your phone away. Turn off the TV. Block any websites that you find compelling. Close any computer tabs you don’t need. Remove any distracting sounds. Turn off the radio.

    5. Learn to be comfortable with being bored. When you’re focused and working, it can also be boring. Most of us choose to distract ourselves because we’re bored. The better you can handle boredom, the easier it is to avoid engaging in those distractions.

        ◦ When you have the urge to distract yourself, force yourself to wait 15 minutes longer. After a few days of this, try 30 minutes. Keep building on this.

    6. Plan time for your most common distractions. You don’t have to avoid your favorites distractions 100% of the time. Simply schedule time for those activities after your work has been completed for the day. Put a reasonable limit on how long you’ll spend on them.

    7. Get enough sleep. Sleep is important for focus and energy. Your brain needs at least seven hours of sleep to be at its best. Have consistent times for going to bed and waking up.

        ◦ Try sleeping for seven hours each night for a week and rate your ability to focus. The following week try 7.5 hours. If you see an improvement, try eight hours. Keep going if necessary and find the optimum amount of sleep for you.

    8. Eat healthy foods. Your body and brain function better when you eat in a healthy manner. Your focus improves with a healthy diet. Start by eliminating everything you know isn’t good for you – one at a time will work.

Life is a never-ending series of distractions. The most successful people are able to focus in spite of distractions. It takes practice to focus intently in the face of other things vying for our attention. Incorporate these tips into your daily schedule and you’ll see your ability to focus grow.

 Less Clutter = Less Stress ^SM     in your home, your business and your life

Organizational Consulting Services

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Visit our Life & Business Coaching website:  North By Northwest

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