There is no doubt that for many people, life is simply too overwhelming. Everyone is given the same 24 hours in a day, but everything you do takes time.
To fit it all in, it’s imperative to prioritize, organize, and delegate. We live in a hectic and complex world. It’s natural to want to get a lot done and to be able to point to your accomplishments.
However, if you don’t slow down and set some goals for your life, personally and work wise, things won’t go as planned and will feel a lot more complicated.
GETTING YOUR PRIORITIES RIGHT
When you want to simplify your life, the first thing that must happen is to set your priorities. This works for both your personal life and your work life.
Whether it’s a large project or a small one doesn’t matter. Knowing how to choose where to start, how to organize it, and what’s most important is essential to your success.
List Every Task You Need to Do
When you have things to do, it’s essential to know what you are doing at any given time in the day. Listing out all the tasks you need to do on any given day is an excellent way to figure out how to organize each task and get it done the right way.
Think of this just like Marie Kondo’s method of organizing your bedroom. You need to be able to see everything you have before you can organize it and classify it.
Put Each Task in the Right Category
Try to put each task into a category that lets you know what it’s for: personal or work. Then also identify whether this task is important, urgent, or something else. This is going to help you identify tasks that you can let someone else do, as well as identify tasks that you’re doing that you can simply let go.
Move Urgent Tasks to the Top
When you notice that some of the tasks are urgent, put them up at the top. For some people, it helps to separate work from personal, but others prefer to just list tasks in the order by which they’ll take care of them. You can make two lists, or you can put it all in one if you have correctly identified whether it’s urgent or not.
Determine the Value of the Task
One of the things you must look at for each task is its value. This is easier to identify if it’s a work thing. You know that putting an item that people can buy up for sale is going to make you money, so it has a high value. But you also know that taking your child to piano lessons is a high value task.
Know the Effort the Task Will Take
This is another important thing to note when you are organizing your tasks. It also helps to look at effort versus value to help classify a task. How long does something really take you to do?
How much money does it cost you to outsource it? Identify all the resources any one task takes - whether it’s you, someone else, money, or a product that helps with it (like maybe to do this task you have to use specialized software that is expensive to buy and hard to understand).
In the last case, after studying the situation you may determine to outsource, for example.
Determine Which Tasks to Cut or Outsource
Now that you have it all out in the open, it’s important to look at the tasks and determine which tasks you don’t even need to do at all, or that you can let someone else do.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s cleaning your house, cooking your dinner, doing your laundry or outsourcing something at work or in your business if you have one – the important point is to let go of the things you do not need to do yourself when it’s feasible to do so.
Don’t skip this step for simplifying your life. You can separate it up if you want to, doing personal and work separately. But whether we like it or not, work and life are inextricably connected for most people today. Knowing how to prioritize at home and work will make your life much more straightforward.