Chaotic Schedule Into Organization

Do you feel like you’re dropping the ball in your personal or professional life because your schedule is too overwhelming? Or perhaps you constantly struggle with being overwhelmed and stressed because you can’t keep up. Chaos is not conducive to productivity and success. It has a negative impact on your mental health and causes you to burn out. Getting organized is crucial if you want to improve your quality of life and boost your daily productivity.

It’s not unusual for highly creative people to trend toward disorganization, which may lead to general untidiness. Having a chronically messy living room may not be a big deal to some. However, if your life and schedule are in constant disarray, you’re less likely to reach your goals and realize your full potential. Creating orderly daily routines can increase productivity and reduce overwhelm. Here are six tips for transforming a chaotic schedule into a more organized one.

1. Separate Your Personal and Work Calendars

Most people combine their personal and work responsibilities into a single calendar. This can be helpful if you’re all about minimization. However, it can also make your day look more daunting and stressful. It might also make it difficult for you to maintain clear boundaries between your professional and personal life and relationships.

If you want to make your daily life calm and orderly, consider separating your personal and work calendars. This can be challenging to do if you’re still working with paper calendars. However, it’s much easier if you use online scheduling tools like Calendar, Google Calendar, or Microsoft Calendar. Scheduling tools such as these make it easy to create multiple calendars and switch seamlessly between them. This feature can help you keep your personal and professional lives neatly separate and organized.

2. Plan for the Coming Day

If you want a great vacation, plan it in advance, right? Most people don’t randomly head to a new state or country without planning a travel itinerary beforehand. Otherwise, they could end up in an unfamiliar location without a place to stay or a way to get around. Creating a travel plan can give you confidence and help you use your vacation time best. Similarly, spending a few minutes each morning creating a plan for your day can help you become more organized and productive.

Set aside time at the start of each morning to plan the rest of your day. To do this without feeling rushed or stressed, you may need to wake up a few minutes earlier each day. You don’t need to make the process overly complicated. Visualize your ideal day, review any tasks, meetings, or other obligations, and then determine how and when you’ll complete them. A simple “to-do” list may be effective for some people, while others may prefer to stay organized using an online calendar.

3. Prioritize Critical Tasks

There’s only so much time in a day, and you can’t always control distractions or setbacks. To make sure you don’t unintentionally drop the ball on something important, it’s imperative to prioritize critical tasks. These are the time-intensive tasks that you must complete by a deadline. Arrange your calendar so that the most important tasks get done first. Then, if you run out of time to complete everything in your calendar, you’ll be grateful that you attended to the most essential items.

What if every task in your calendar seems to be a top priority? It can be an overwhelming feeling when everything on your plate seems to be equally urgent. Use these tips to help you separate true priorities from those that are less deserving of your energy and time:

  • Place the urgent (time-sensitive) and important items at the top of your calendar or to-do list.
  • Important but less time-sensitive priorities come next on your list. Schedule these the next time you are available after taking care of your urgent responsibilities.
  • If you have time-sensitive responsibilities that are less important than other items on your list, consider delegating them to someone else. This can help you free up more time for urgent and important responsibilities.
  • Any outstanding items that simply aren’t urgent or important can be dropped entirely from your calendar or to-do list. Consider delegating if someone on your team has time to do them. But since they are neither urgent nor important, it doesn’t really matter if they get done now or in a few weeks.

This prioritization method can significantly reduce your stress load and help you become more productive. It can also help you avoid wasting your limited time on things of little to no importance.

4. Change Your Calendar View to Avoid Overwhelm

If you get easily overwhelmed when you look at your calendar, the solution may be simpler. Many online scheduling tools allow you to change your calendar view as desired. For example, instead of viewing an entire month at a time, you could change your view to a weekly calendar. That way, you can focus solely on what you have to do that week.

You can also change your calendar view to a daily view if you prefer to take things one day at a time. This is a great way to help you focus on the most urgent upcoming tasks. However, it’s important to still look at your weekly and monthly calendar views regularly. That way, you can anticipate and prepare for upcoming commitments, meets, and tasks.

5. Break Down Large Projects or Tasks Into Manageable Chunks

Having a calendar full of huge, challenging tasks can be intimidating. For some people, big, looming projects can activate their avoidance response and lead them to procrastinate. This, in turn, can lead to last-minute panic or burnout as the deadline rapidly approaches. If the “to-do” items on your calendar seem daunting, consider breaking them down into more manageable micro-tasks.

A micro-task is a small piece that fits into a larger project. For example, if your to-do list includes getting a new website ready for launch, that can seem pretty intimidating. But try breaking that project into smaller tasks and see how much more doable it becomes. For example, you might decide to finalize your website design by the end of the day, write or order SEO content by the end of the week, and test website functionality by the end of the month. Breaking your project into bite-sized tasks reduces the urge to procrastinate and can help you meet deadlines without getting overwhelmed.

6. Evaluate and Adjust Your Schedule As Needed

At the end of each day, take a few minutes to evaluate your schedule and adjust tomorrow’s schedule as needed. If you can’t complete everything on your calendar for the day, you may need to work on those unfinished things tomorrow. You’ll probably have to drop some less important tasks from tomorrow’s schedule or push them to another day.

You shouldn’t feel like a failure if you have to rearrange your schedule at times. It’s natural to overestimate how much you can get done in a single day or week. Plus, unforeseen situations can pop up and temporarily disrupt the most well-laid plans. Instead of allowing unexpected detours to totally derail and discourage you, learn how to be flexible. It may take some finagling, but you should still be able to adjust your schedule to make time for your most crucial responsibilities.

Anyone can become more organized once they have the right tools in their proverbial “toolbelt.” Use these tips to create order out of your chaotic schedule. You’ll not only increase your daily productivity, but you’ll also decrease your likelihood of missing deadlines or experiencing burnout.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by cottonbro studio; Pexels