How to stay organised when you have lots to do
Lots to do and no idea how to do it all? Here’s one way you can try to pull it all together!
You’re busy - or to put it bluntly, you’ve most likely said yes more than no and now you find yourself in a ‘oh my goodness, how am I ever going to get this all done’ style of overwhelm.
Ideate
Well relax, or instead, get organised! Here is one method you can use to get your life together a little when workloads feel overwhelming. This is based from many hours on Youtube searching the title of this blog, personal experience and trial and error.
Let’s get to it!
Iterate
There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to organise yourself and to some extent, each person's own method is uniquely theirs, but here is one method that you can steal and make your own.
Check in with yourself!
Sit down once a week and ask yourself: “Am I on track?”, “How do I feel?”, “Do I need to readjust next week’s plan?” (I like to do this on a Sunday as a mental reset). You can do this in the form of a journal, Notion page, some bullet points on some paper or even a slideshow -whatever works best for your brain. The main thing is to see if your plan from last week is working and make adjustments to how you work when you can see it isn’t working. The biggest question to ask yourself is how you feel - being super productive at the expense of your sanity isn’t productivity, it’s madness.
Google Calendar, Toggl and your work system (such as monday.com or Asana) are your new best friends, chat to them often!
Sometimes we have these beautiful fancy systems and we just don’t use them (looking at you my Neurospicy friends!). Start making an effort to use these tools to your advantage. Here is one method:
Use Google Calendar to track your meetings and on a Sunday, plan your travel time and daily routines into the Calendar too -see what time you have left that you can squeeze in some work (and some relaxation time!) into.
Use Toggl (or any time management tool) to see overtime how long certain tasks take you. It’s taken months of using it, but I now know that writing a blog post for client A takes approximately 30 minutes for example -you can then budget your time better moving forward. This also allows you to see if you’re packing too much into your day and stretching yourself too thin!
Regardless of what system you use (monday.com, asana, etc), ensure that you’re making the most out of it. Get some training, watch some videos on how best to use it and make sure everything goes into it. I even put my personal to do’s there because work and personal have a bit of an overlap in my creative schedule! The big thing here, is to not over estimate what you can achieve in a day -I have a friend who labels her tasks by how long she thinks they will take to complete and then schedules her day around that instead of priority! Whatever works for you will be trial and error.
Bonus Tip!
I love VA’s (Virtual Assistant’s, and no they are not robots, they are real people) - I’ve said this before but having a VA is life changing and if you can afford to do it, having another person on your team who can encourage (and scold a little when needed!) is a huge advantage. Especially when they can take little tasks and administrative tasks away too! Check out Wired Differently, the company I use.
Implement
🧠 How do you manage your schedule, task load and time?
🧠 Do you always find yourself stressed out by how much you have to do?