You may recognise those who are organised all around you. They are the people who never turn up to work late; they complete their projects way ahead of the deadline and they always seem to have interesting plans for the weekend!

If you feel like your miles away from this sort of lifestyle, you should know that order can be created out of chaos. Jon Trusko, the founder of OrganizingLA, says that “organised people are born, not built.” 

And what better time to adopt a few strategies of organised people and create a healthy routine than whilst the country is still in lockdown?

Being away from our good friends and loved ones is really difficult, especially as we are mostly confined to our homes. You may even feel as though your days are unproductive or completely wasted. Nobody said a world pandemic was going to be easy. But, out of these strange days, good can arise. With our newfound extra time, whether that be a little or a lot, new habits can be created and cemented so that they will last even when the lockdown is over.

If you wish to get your life in order and determine a positive daily routine before stepping back in the hustle and bustle of our ‘normal’ daily lives; here are 6 habits of organised people that we should all incorporate into our routines

1. Planning Your Day

If you recoil at the joyless idea of rules and routine, planning out your day may seem quite the constraint. But, in reality, creating a routine can be freeing and it may even help you bring more purpose to your daily life. 

As you plan your day, you can be super detailed and plan each minute of your day, or you may simply create an uncomplicated to-do-list. Whatever your preference, it is excellent practice to write down your aims for that day.

You can download an app specifically for this, such as Todoist (or just use a notepad or a calendar), to create your daily plan. Once it’s down in pen – or pixels – then it already has already begun materialising. 

The process of writing your to-do-list will give you an almost omniscient perspective over your day-to-day tasks, where you can determine whether your daily goals are aligning with your long-term ambitions. If they’re not, you can easily change your daily priorities accordingly in advance. Plus, ticking off each task will give you a great boost and sense of accomplishment.

Here are a few tips for planning:

• Plan even the small things (e.g. laundry, cooking, etc) – they add up!
• Dedicate an hour a week to planning your week
• Overestimate how long a task will take you
• Try time blocking your day

2. Purging, and Regularly

Going through our things regularly and purging, or clearing out, what we don’t need will prevent any clutter sneaking up on us. There is no need to hold on to unnecessary things. 

For example, when you’re finished reading a magazine or book, gift it to a friend or a charity shop, don’t leave it sitting on your shelf if you don’t think you’ll read it again. Or, once you’ve gone through your letters, either file them or throw them out, bits of paper can be stressful to go through when they build up. This is also relevant to clothes, food, children’s toys and any other possessions.

3. Designating a Spot for Everything

Misplacing things can be the cause of a lot of frustration, so to eliminate this unnecessary stress, you should allocate a designated spot for all of your things. Socks, pens, reading glasses, keys, wallets, TV remotes. Everything. 

If you want to be really organised, not only will everything have its own place, but this everything should be really easy to access, which can be achieved by installing drawer organisers, having a key hook, or making a herb rack, just for example. 

Our Narven sideboard is great for this as it has drawers where you can keep your matches, bottle openers and coasters, as well as large cupboards underneath which can be used for crockery, pots and pans and glasses. It also boasts a nice wide countertop so you can place your go-to items right in your line of sight.

4. Practising Maintenance

Unfortunately, you can’t just organise everything in a day and that be that. As Lisa Zaslow, founder of Gotham Organizers, cleverly puts it: “You don’t go to the gym, get in shape, then cancel your membership.” Organisation follows the same rules.

If you want to be more organised, you should take a few moments each day to put things back in their proper places. This might be something as simple as clearing up the desktop on your computer if you use that regularly, or putting the dishes away before you go to bed. These little tasks prevent a big clean up, which can become quite daunting if you haven’t been keeping on top of things.

5. Projecting Yourself into the Future

We don’t mean literally. Though it would be pretty cool to be able to travel in time! What we mean is that you should be conscious of your future self when you are doing something, or maybe not doing something. Lorie Marrero, founder of the Clutter Diet, says that she likes to think of her future self when she takes care of small tasks right away.

“If I walk through a room and see a mess, I will say, “I bet if I do those dishes now my future self will be so much happier later,” she says. “That motivates me to do those favors for my future self.”

Zaslow backs this up by saying that “the tiny amount of time it takes to do this is vastly less than the time it takes to look for something that wasn’t put away properly,” which our future selves would definitely not be thankful for.

6. Consistency Over Perfection

Consistency is better than perfection and it’s really important that you don’t beat yourself up if you can’t keep up with your to-do-list. Life happens, and that’s okay. Just pick it back up as soon as you can, and you’ll be back on track to creating a more organised lifestyle for yourself. 

To help you along the way, make sure you create realistic plans that fit into your life and don’t burn yourself out trying to do everything in one go. By understanding the impact of incremental progress and the power of compounding effort, we can be more realistic and get more out of life.

If you have any more organisation tips that you’d like to share with us, let us know by getting in touch with Made With Oak on social media.