(This article originally appeared in The Weekly Simplifier #13.)

By Shawn Tuttle

In a special “multimedia” article, we’d like to share this illustration of some of the key elements of an organized life. If you work to abide by these main themes in your life, you will de facto become more organized! The mini-elements provide some ways to make the bigger elements more bearable and easier to manage. Beneath the diagram we’ve included some notes of clarification, and provided links to other Project Simplify resources that are available on these topics.

Click here for a larger version of the diagram as an image file.
Click here for a larger version as a PDF file.

Main Elements:

Visualize priorities
How do you want to feel going through your day? How do you want to react in situations? How do you as your “best” self feel? What do you want your space to look like? Take a few moments to visualize this. By visualize I mean: relax, paint a visual image representing your ideal, explore what it feels like, make it a part of you. Why is this powerful? Being in touch with your best self, and knowing what your goals are provide the “compass” to navigating the unexpected terrain of life with meaningful results. A great time to do this regularly is during Planning Time (see below). It also helps with scheduling.

Be Pro-active
Do what you planned, when you planned to do it. It won’t get done by itself! Tip for pro-active clutter busting: Never set something down to “take care of later”. When you have something in your hand, only put it down where it is supposed to go.

Planning Time
Planning Time has come up twice in recent Project Simplify articles: “Planning Time vs. Doing Time” introduces the concept, and “Plan to Prevent Overwhelm” digs deeper into the benefits of making effective use of planning.

A place for everything
The full organizers adage: “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Clutter often is the result of not knowing where to put something and not wanting to deal with finding a place for it. Evaluate what is out of place, (be pro-active!) take a moment to determine where the best home for that item is.

Scheduling
Such a wonderful pro-active tool! How to make sure family outings happen? Schedule them in! Make it a habit to work backwards to determine when you need to leave in order to get to an appointment 15 minutes early (yes, 15 minutes early! See Time Realism below). Having people over on Friday? Work backwards to see how you can spread out preparations over a several day period. After you’ve broken a big project into sprints (see Small Steps below), work backwards, to sprinkle these sprints into your schedule.

Mini-elements:

Small Steps
Break big projects into small steps. Do super short sprints rather than marathons. Marathons are too easy to put off, and once you get going, too easy to get distracted from. During your sprint, establish a time limit and mono-task, put on blinders!

Mono-task
Mono-tasking is the opposite of multi-tasking, and was the focus of The Weekly Simplifier # 9. Word on the street (and in more and more studies) is that multi-tasking is not as great as we’ve been led to believe. You may get more done if you try mono-tasking. Read more here.

Time Realism
The average person schedules 18 hours of appointments and tasks into a 12 hour day. Some people can realistically guess how long a task will take, but then completely disregard preparation and clean-up times. Appointments: Sure it only takes 15 minutes to get there, but what about the time it takes to load the car, take a final “potty” run, get gas, and really, who budgets time for parking? (Time realists, that’s who!)

Bio-rhythms
Scheduling with your bio-rhythms means doing the right activities at the right time for you. It was dealt with in greater length in TWS #5 as our Tip of the Week, and it’s now a blog entry of its own in our Time Management section.

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Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify.