Whether you’re in the middle of your college career, just getting started at your very first job, or a veteran of your industry, good organizational skills is often a defining characteristic of successful people. In fact, keeping your personal items tidy and your to-do list optimized can increase your productivity, reduce stress, boost your creativity, and even improve your relationships with other people in your life. Struggling with staying organized? Here are four organization tips that will help you regain some order in your daily life.
1. Start and Keep a Calendar or Planner
Ever feel like you have something coming up soon but you just…can’t remember what exactly it was? Or where you need to be? Don’t worry, this is a normal feeling—it’s relatively easy to lose track of all the events you have going on in your life, especially when you’re at work and you need to juggle meetings and your own personal tasks.
One of the best ways to solve this problem is to start and keep a calendar or planner. This can either be on your cell phone, your computer, or even in a physical agenda. When you write down all of the things you need to accomplish, it becomes easier to remember them—and thankfully, if you do still forget, you know exactly where to look to find out what you need to do.
2. Create Folders For Important Documents
Another great way to ensure that you never lose an important document is to keep color coded or numbered folders for everything that’s important. While you might think of physical folders at first, this extends to folders on your computer desktop as well.
Creating easy to find folders for all of your information is key to ensuring that you’ll never be caught off guard when you need to reference or send something.
3. Begin and Maintain a Routine
Sometimes, before we can start becoming more organized at school or work, we need to take a big step back and ensure that our everyday lives are organized. Think about it this way: if you’re flying by the seat of your pants each and every day, it’s going to be hard to be successfully organized in the smaller aspects of your life.
Take an hour and write down all the things you do in a week, such as sleep, school, work, and exercise. Then, try to create a schedule for each day in the upcoming week with these tasks and hold yourself accountable to it. Continue this for a few weeks, and more than likely, you’ll fall into a routine. Routines help us limit stress and become more productive overall, which can help you build more organization in your life.
4. Clean Your Personal Spaces
This might sound like an obvious tip, but one of the best ways to become more organized is to make sure your personal spaces (at home, school, and work) are tidy. Having a clean space will help you get into a more productive mindset, and not to mention, it’ll be much easier to find things you’re looking for since everything will be organized.
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