How to get organized and improve your lifestyle!

In this Instructable, ill show you how to get organized!

Step 1 Realize how unorganized you are!

The first step to getting organized is, well, to realize how unorganized you are! If your like me, not a neat freak or far from it, then this is the hardest step. Actually, my mom made me get organized because she said "this place looks like a pig-pen!". You may have other motivations, but the end goal is still the same. Take a look at your stuff... If it looks like the pictures or anything similar, YOU NEED TO GET ORGANIZED!!!!

Comments

[Small Things]

 I cant comprehend how much you have changed my life, thank you so much

[flaresam]

Troll detected!

[phant0m_sp00f3ra]

Kill it with FIRE!

[zimmemic25]

lol

[jogrebe]

Thank you for including this info.  I just read this for the first time and I can already tell that it is probably one of the main major breakthroughs that I need to get a hand on my workspace situation.

[lovepirate9]

Nice job on getting organized!! I only wish I could do the same, mine consists of getting rid of a lot of things....but for some reason, ive got like an oober bad case of being a pack rat!!

[flaresam]

Lol me too. Did you see the picture of my old desk?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

me 3!!! you should see my desk... it has holes in it!!!

[corporatezero35]

I use rubber bands to hold cables like that since they don't leave a residue if they sit for too long.

[kenshin5150]

thats much better than my drawer .. >_<

[flaresam]

lmao, you should have seen my room >.<

[ggiihh1]

I like the window shades, where'd you get them?

[Phil B]

Personal information management software will help anyone who wants to be better organized. An excellent free program is Mozilla's Sunbird. You can enter advance dates on a calendar with notations on each so you have all of the details you need without trying to remember. You can also enter memo items so you no longer need to remember where you put something, but you can do a global search to find your note. Set it so it opens when you boot your computer. Scan ahead each day about ten days to see what is coming and be thinking about it. Your mind will work in the background to make coming tasks easier. There is an old story about Charles Schwab and Ivy Lee. Schwab hired Lee to study the operation at Bethlehem Steel in about 1916 in order to make it more efficient. Schwab agreed to pay Lee whatever he thought Lee's advice was worth. Lee's recommendation was that each manager at the end of the day wrote on a piece of paper the six things he wanted to accomplish the next day. He would put them in order from most important to least important and do the most important first. If he did not accomplish all six things, that was fine. He had done the most important things. Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000. In today's dollars that is over $500,000. Do some thinking each month about what you want to accomplish in life. Break that down into goals. Filter these things by realizing some are fond wishes and not really important to your life. Recognize that 80 percent of what you really need to do comes from 20 percent of your efforts. Work at eliminating things from your life that are not really that important, even if others think they are or push them onto you. When you are procrastinating, try to break down what you must do but do not want to do into smaller pieces. Attack these smaller pieces. Soon the whole job will seem more manageable and you will have it done. Take some time each day to read and grow in your knowledge and skills.

[flaresam]

WOW! That was amaisnig! Do you mind if i put that in my instructable?

[Phil B]

Include it if you wish. I actually stole what you see from several sources. I first saw the Charles Schwab in a Reader's Digest article many years ago. It is also on the Internet now. Sunbird came as an update on the Firefox browser. Some of the things about entering memos, and looking ahead ten days or so came from my experiences with the Franklin Day Planner. You can get some of the same information in "10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management" by Hyrum W. Smith. The 80/20 rule and breaking tasks into smaller pieces to overcome procrastination came from "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by Alan Lakein. I really liked my Franklin Day Planner, but switched over to a Palm PDA. I try to incorporate some of the strategies from Franklin in the way I use my Palm. The Sunbird software will do some of the same things the Palm desktop software does. You merely do not have the handheld device to synchronize and take with you. But, you can check your Sunbird entries each morning and make some notes on a piece of paper you take with you. People who are very efficient regularly buy and read books on time management. Hyrum Smith's book helps you organize that efficiency around a life purpose set by you.

[Phil B]

I want to add something I have found helpful. Have a dozen file folder or manilla envelopes in a drawer or on a shelf. Number them 1 through 12. I use these as temporary safe storage for all sorts of things, including offers over which I suffer indecision. Let us say an offer comes in the mail for a seminar you might like to attend. One option is to let it lay on top of your desk until you decide, but chances are it will get buried and you will forget. Put the offer into one of your folders. I find I usually know within three weeks if I am really interested or not. Make an entry on Sunbird three weeks from now that says, "Make decision." Attach a memo to that entry that says, "seminar registration--folder #2." Sunbird will automatically remind you to act on the seminar registration. The memo tells you exactly where you placed the relevant materials. You can also use this when an important renewal arrives in the mail. Maybe you do not have the money to pay for it now, but you will have it in two weeks. The renewal is due in three weeks. Place the paperwork into any folder. Make a note on Sunbird two weeks from today. Sunbird will remind you automatically and will tell you where you put the paperwork. If your paperwork came as an e-mail, move that e-mail to a special electronic folder in your Inbox and make a note in Sunbird, or print the e-mail and put a copy in your manilla folders. You can also keep records on important conversations by means of this process. Later when someone goes back on what he promised, you will have detailed notes you can read back to him. Eventually that will save you hundreds of dollars.

[shooby]

A big part of this is the idea of purpose. In order to be successful at something, you need to have some conviction as to why you would bother. Generally, when people excel at something, it is because they have a purpose, whether they've articulated it or not. If you don't know why you're doing something, chances are you won't be successful at it. In the context of organization, it can often lead to procrastination if you're organizing to better complete a task that you have no true reason for completing.

[flaresam]

this is true, thanks for the insight, the whole reson i got orgnised was because i was allways loosing things, and i wanted to beable to find things faster =)