Organise Your Life & Actually Get Stuff Done

1. Introduction: Welcome to the course Getting Organized, Tips and Tricks. In this course, I'm going to go through the different tips and tricks and tools that I use to get organized in my life. This will involve a lot of white boards, a lot of organization around the house. But the point is, is that it's going to help you just take control of your life so you can get the things done that you really want to get done. I've in the past found that it felt like there's so much stuff going on that I can't keep track of it all. That there's always things to do, places to be, people to meet, and it just became overwhelming. That overwhelmed led to a breakdown. That breakdown led to a lack of commitments which led to further issues. It was compounding cycle. It can be quite challenging to pull yourself out of that because you're trying to lay the foundation in quicksand. What this course will do will be to help you to start that process. To start putting in the different tools and ideas that I've found that works, works for me and works for my clients. The key thing that you're going to realize though is that just because it works for me, just because it works for other people doesn't mean it's going to work for you and that's okay. This is a starting point. A way to a stepping off point that you can start aiming your own organization for because we're different. But what I do know is, is that if I show you a path, you can head down that path and make tweaks and alterations to what works for me to make sure it best works for you. Okay, so without further ado, let's get into the course getting organized and get some of these tools and tips and tricks working in your life. 2. Find What Works For You: In this course, I'm going to show you the different tools that I use. There's a few different things you're going to need for this if you want to follow what I'm doing Now, the cave up here is that I'm showing you what works for me, and I suggest that you try it. But just because it works for me, it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. I've had to practice a variety of different things. And I got these ideas from other people that were promoting self help. Stuff from books, from online courses, from people in real life. What I did was I looked at the variety of different ideas that they had and took a little bit from each of them, and tweaked and twisted them to a way that works best for me. Now this is a constant journey. What I'm using now will change in a year. But what I'm suggesting to you is, is to consider what I've done and try them, and tweak them for yourself, because what works for me may not work for you. It's this idea of sampling everything, filtering it out, and then working out your best ideal. Because no matter who you are, you will be able to see that other people have come before you and lit the path. There's many paths that have been lit up right by people that are world class performers, people that have overcome mental health concerns, people that are just getting themselves organized. What path is best for you? I'm not sure. I'm going to show you the ones that work for me and try them if they work for you. If you make little tweaks, great, just keep trying, keep implementing them. And if you do make some tweaks, let me know because your ideas might help me. Without further ado, let's get into it. 3. Morning Routine Write Up: The first thing I'm going to suggest that you get is a bunch of white boards. Because whiteboards are great because you can update them and tweak them quite easily. What I've got here, if you look in the Resources tab, I'm going to put a picture of this so it would be a little bit easier to read. But this is a morning routine. This is what I do in my mornings. I wake up at 06:00 A.M. I do a few different things and then I leave for my bike ride at 07:00 A.M. This is the routine that works for me. I've got a bunch of courses on morning routines and that sort of stuff. So I'm not going to break necessarily too deep into the Y here, but it's more the tool of a whiteboard. Now, I've tweaked and played around with waking up at different times and all of that sort of stuff. And I'm going to be pushing back my 06:00 A.M. wake up time a little bit earlier. But I found that 06:00 A.M. is a good time to go to sleep, is a good time to wake up compared to when I want to go to sleep. Because now I'm working split shifts. When I didn't work split shifts, this was changed, right? So the point I'm trying to make is that this is a working document, but my mornings look like this. I wake up at 06:00 A.M. then I will do 10 minutes of prep. So that's like a toiletry toothbrush, drink of water, all of that sort of stuff. I will do a ten minute guided meditation on the waking up at by Sam Harris. Followed by 10 minutes from this meditation, I've got some meditation courses that you can check out. If you want to know how I meditate strongly, strongly suggest you get get onto the meditation. I do 10 minutes of stretching just to get my body loose and I do 5 minutes of type check. Now, you're noticing here I've not done anything about checking my social media, my e mails, or anything like that. Why? Because I've learned that if I wake up and check, that I get sucked into it, my morning goes and I'm thinking about all of this stuff online that I don't need to deal with until after I come back from work. All of this is, there's no social, no podcast, nothing. Okay. I've found that that works best for me. Now, down here, I've got 15 minutes of prep before work. So that means like getting my food ready, getting my bike ready, checking over things, making sure I'm ready for the day. And then I do a 07:00 A.M. ride to work. Now some days the weather is terrible. The 07:00 A.M. if the weather is terrible, it means got another 20 minutes to do something right. Because it's the difference between riding and driving. The point of this is that get yourself a whiteboard, write it up, and put it on your wall. I actually remove these hooks and stuff on this wall, but I can hang up stuff and I'll hold it there so that every day I can see my morning routine. Now, like I said, this changes. A whiteboard marker is great because when you're setting up a morning routine, you will write it out, you'll give it a shot. And you realize I actually need more time to get ready in the morning. I actually need to put a first alarm. A bit earlier, my kid wakes up. So I need a little bit more time that can be like float time. When I was working this out with my wife, she needs a lot more time. That's just unaccounted for time because my son will wake up at a random time and he has to be helped and cared for and all of that stuff she puts into her morning routine. It's a little bit more flexible than mine because that's what life suggests for her. Get yourself a whiteboard, write up your morning routine and tweak it and play with it, and work out what best for you. Check out the morning routine course on that one. 4. Weekly Planner: Okay, on the wall behind me you can see my weekly planner. Once again, it's another whiteboard and don't worry about how far away it is. You can pick it up and open up the image of it so you can look at this in detail. I suggest you do that while we're looking through, but this is a weekly planner, basically being self employed and doing stuff online. It's very easy to lose track, get unorganized, and just lose days. It can be easy to get too focused on one thing. It to disregard my commitments, obligations, and enjoyment of seeing friends and family. What I found is that I have to plot out my week so I can see it. If I don't see it, I have a tendency to forget. What this one does is it's got my week on the top, my partner's week on the bottom. And then we can easily see each other's week. This takes away that issue of communicating, where are you, what are we doing? We can see in general where we are now. Once again, it's like I adhere to this strictly, but it's also quite flexible. For example, Monday, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are work days. On those days, I block out the time, so I'm like, okay, that's when I'm at work, that's all I'm doing. I work as a disability support worker now on Thursdays, it's a half day, so that means I've got space here on Saturday and Sunday, their weekend days. But I want to do the online work, Today is a Saturday. You notice here I've got skill share and podcast recording. That's what I'm doing today. I've got some upkeep, which means I'm doing my online upkeep editing. All of that stuff. I've realized for myself, I need to rust in a rest day. That's my Sunday. Now, if for example I'm feeling extra tired, I can switch my Saturday and Sundays around. Yeah, Tuesday is a fiction writing day because I want to do fiction writing. Get into all of that stuff. I've blocked that time out. Then I can correlate that to my partner's week. Now once again with the child, her week is a little bit more flexible and free. She's slotting things in. She works from home so she doesn't actually have to leave to do the job. But the point of this is, is that I've broken it down based on the days and Am. And Pm. Just roughly put in the time. At a glance, I can see what I'm doing. I can see what my partner's doing. I can see what my my child is doing, and we can work it out based on that. We roster in certain things that we like. For example, on a Saturday, I've got a date night with my wife. I value that. But if I didn't roster that in, I wouldn't do it. Things would get filled up. Now, that's not to say that we will always do that on a Saturday, because some Saturdays she goes out with friends. Some Saturdays I go out with friends or I'm busy or work, calls me in or whatever. Right? In that case, we twist and tweak to work out different days. For example, the Thursday night is free so we can switch it in there. The point I'm trying to make with all of this is that it's good to have everything set up. If I was single and on my own, I'll still have this so that at a glance I could see it. Now, you could add to this your school schedules, your gym schedules, your client meetings, whatever you like, that is consistent. Leave some blank time. Leave some time to work on your own stuff. At the moment, we're filming during quarantine, right? When quarantines over martial arts, open back up my jujitsu. I'll put that in there as well so I can see at a glance. Okay, This is when I'm training. And that means that if it's on the board, my partner, there's no gil's no issue, there's no factor. This is just what's happening that way. I know it, she knows it. Everyone knows it. And I can make sure that I stay organized. Because like I said, if I don't see if it's not up there, if it's not put in place, there's a real risk of it just falling to the wayside once again. Second white board by the days at the top, MPM. You could split it into more gaps if you like. For example, mid afternoon night, you can do just on just a single day, you could split it by the hours, whatever works for you. But see your week put in the regular stuff so that you can get at a visual glance what your life looks like. 5. Task Planner: Okay, so this one is for people who have a lot of little continuous projects on the go. If you have a side hustle or a secondary job, or if your job involves lots of tasks that you need to get done regularly. Right. I'll explain it as we go. Once again, there's an image of this, so you can look at it in more depth. But the idea of this is simple for me personally. I do a couple of podcasts. I do blogs, I do videos, I do these skillshare courses. I do a variety of things online. I do my writing fiction. But what I was finding was that I would focus on only doing the things that I really, really, really loved. I would forget to do other things, or I would only do the recording of it, not the uploading of it, because the uploading and the editing is a bit boring, right? But in order to get stuff out, in order to keep producing, in order to make sure that I'm not that I'm actually able to fulfill the commitments that I've said that I would to people online. I realized I had to organize myself. How can I best organize myself in this instance? Once again, another whiteboard I've put up the top here. Each one of these is a different item of things. For example, podcast fiction writing, different podcast my poems, blogs, another podcast, video courses. Right now, you can fill up, obviously, your projects however you like. The point of this is I've got the projects, then I've got the little subtitles for my fiction. I've got a couple of subtitles of what I'm currently working on, what I want to be working on, chapter titles for poems. I've got stuff that I need to upload and edit and create posters for and create prints and all of these things for put it out on medium, put it out and share. What goes into this is specific for me, but you'll have different tasks that you need to do. Okay? If you're a teacher marking papers, it might be filing reports, it might be building something, whatever it is. Right. But you can lock it in. Now, I've got up here the week and the date. I know where we're at, because each of these things has to be done at different intervals. For example, I aim to release one podcast per week. Up here, we've got one per week, but I aim to do one chapter of my book per month. So that's one per month, right? Each thing I work on has different schedules. What I want to know is, have I done it for the particular schedule? For example, you see a tick here. This suggests that I've done the podcast for this week. I haven't written the chapter for the month yet. At a glance I can see, oh, I need to do that, not this. Does that make sense? I can at a glance, see what task I need to do. Because let's say I find myself with an hour of free time. What do I work on? Well, in the past, if I didn't have something like this, I would work on something. I wanted to work on whatever popped into my mind, which is okay. But it meant that a lot of the other stuff didn't get done or I would just waste it because I'm like, oh, I deserve a time and break off and yeah, look, obviously take the self care and all that stuff that I talk about. But there are things that I want to get done. How can I guarantee myself to get those things done? Ticket in the box. Now you could use this system, this structure here, to clean up after yourself. House cleaning, house tasks. You can learn it for a variety of things. The point is when you visually see on your wall what you've got to get done and when it really does help, I have up over here to do section, which is just a general to do list. I have different projects that are a little bit more random than my regular ones over here that I want to get done. Miscellaneous things and other stuff. Like I've said, these are all, all the stuff I've got here is a working document in a year's time, right? I might do another one of these courses and this set up will look different. Why? Because I've learned what works best for me right now. This is my best guess. Just having a look over it right now, I can see some little tweaks and changes that I'll want to make, right? But the point is, it's not going to be perfect the first time you start working on this stuff. It can't be, get something started, get an organization structure in place, and you'll be able to start working through it as best you can. Does that make sense? 6. Functionality Checklist: What you see behind me now is a mental health checklist. Once again, I've put these resources up on the Skill Share Resources tab. You'll be able see a picture and see it for yourself. The idea of this mental health checklist is basically to keep my brain functioning. I suffer from a variety of mental illnesses that have the potential to derail me. But I also know from experience over time in introspection and just working out what's worked. There are certain things that I can do that will help cut those breakdowns off. They don't always work. It's not always going to be guaranteed. But there are certain things that I can do that I know that will help my mental state. I can exercise, do some jujitsu, some weight, some running, Just get my body moving. I could shock the system. Do something to just take me out of that mental state. Go into nature, I can meditate. I could read or write. I could talk about the logic of the issue that I'm facing. I could do a status check. Am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I sick? I go through all of these, It's like a little quick measure of me going. How am I feeling right now? What can I do now? I have this printed up on my wall. Why? Because when I'm starting to feel depressed, it's hard to think. Look at it and go, okay, This is when I need to trigger this, bam, I go to it, work through, work through, work through, work through, work through, so that ideally don't lose a day or a week or whatever to mental health concerns. What I've got here and why I use it will be different for you. You may have different stuff on this list. You certainly will. It's what works for you. Do you have a bath with certain foods? Help? Do you want to read a book? Do you want to see someone? Do you want to call someone, play music? Whatever works for you. Right? You notice on here, I don't have music. Why doesn't really bring me out of a mood? Okay, But you might use that. You might have play guitar, whatever it is. The point is is work out a list of things that will help you get out of that funk. It doesn't have to be as serious as you've got a mental illness. In fact, it's not for that. It's, I'm feeling lazy, I'm feeling a bit forlorn. I'm feeling a bit lethargic. I'm worried that I will lose my day to this. Work out what works for you. Write it up. I've a link down below to a course that I've got on how to deal and how to make these, check it out. Yeah. 7. Goals List: What you see behind me is a goals list. Once again, you can check the resources and you'll be able to read this in person and you can check out the Creating a goals course that I've got up online. Now, just to clarify, these goals are large, they're out there, right? These are what works for me. 1 million book sales, winning a Judy competition, become fluent in Russian, financially free, and complete a marathon. Now, I am not close to doing these. I'm going to attempt a marathon. I reckon I'll be able to cross that off the list, but I'm most certainly very far away from these ones. That's not the point, it's these goals are my distant like mountain goals. This is what I'm aiming for in the future. Well, I ever get them, I hope so. I'd love to be in a position where I have the skills, have the ability, have the lifestyle, all that stuff where I'm here, like I said, a long way to go. But what having a goal does is it points you in the direction. It's like in the long distance is a goal that I'm going to achieve or that I'm aiming for. Now, can these goals change? Of course they can change. I might get overwriting books, I might want to change my topic, might get whatever. That's okay. But the point of having a goal written up is that once again, you wake up and you go, okay, this is why I'm doing this, this is what I'm aiming for. This is why I'm training every day. This is why I eat well and diet well. This is why I'm investing my money. Yet for me becoming fluent in Russian, my partner's Russian. My son is half Russian, which means that if I can learn it, I can speak it with him, I can speak it better with her. I can help my son have a relationship and a deep cultural heritage, right? I'm not Russian, but it's something that it's my goal. All of these relate to a big why. Why am I doing this? Once again, it's on the wall. I can remind myself, why do I want to sell 1 million books? Honestly, it's bragging rights to be honest. Right. It would be a good goal to have. Now, I might change this to New York Times bestselling author. I might change it to one book a day. Who knows, whatever the goal is. Right? It's okay to change the goals. But the point of having these up is that I can see aim towards it. When I talk about the projects that I've got on line. In the previous video when I had the projects up and you could see which projects I'm working on, it's like, okay, well why do I get up and exercise every morning? Okay. Do I work on the podcast and the writing and all of these things? Why am I practicing Russian every day? This is the reason. Now the goal itself isn't reason enough. You don't aim for a goal to be able to do the goal, for example, financially free. It would be great to never have to worry about money, but that's not enough of a reason why. Why do I want to not have to worry about money? Well, it would give me more time to do courses like this. It would give me more time to write, It would give me more time with my family. It would give me more time to do the other things that I love. Yeah, I encourage you to check out the goal setting courses. More importantly, just as important, write up a goal lift and have it on your wall. 8. Daily Carry: Let's talk day to day organization to make sure that we're keeping on board with our commitments, our ideas and all of that stuff. There's a couple of things that I carry around in my pockets all the time. Now, this could be a bug because I'm a writer. But even prior to writing, I found that if I didn't write it down, I would forget it. What do I carry in my pockets? Well, the first thing I want to show you is literally just a pen and a pad. I went to the shop and I found the best pen that I like. I'll put a link down below so you can check out all of these brands and stuff. But this is my favorite pen, This is my favorite note pad. I keep them in my pocket. What do I use this for? I'm talking to someone and I need to make sure that they know that. I know that I'm listening. Pull out the pen and note pad and hey, I'm taking notes on our conversation. That looks great for a boss, it looks great for anything important, right? Because you're literally taking notes on what's important. Now, it's not enough to just take the notes. You have to look at them and read them with those notes. I'll put them on the whiteboards that I talked about before or I'll put it on a to do list in my computer, or I'll type it into a phone. I will do something with these. I will review it, pen and notepad. Now for me, there's the extra benefit of I write down poetry, I write down little thoughts that I want to write about. And if you're interested in writing therapy, check out the video courses on those. But the point is I have these pen and pocket, right? And there's added benefits. Sometimes you just need to give someone a quick note of something you've been speaking to someone. Hey, check it out. Here you go. Carry one with you at all times. The second thing I carry with me, which is I'm debating between whether I need both of these, but I'm finding I do, is a little voice recorder. This is a Olympus model S 853. I'll put a link down below so you can check it out as well. But the point of this is, the reason I use this one, is that when I have a long sequence of thoughts, I find that I think best when walking. I might have an idea for, once again, a book, a poem, some writing, and some capacity. But also I have ideas for how to improve myself. What organizations I'm going to use exercises to use, things that I need to do around the home. Take a little quick note, play it back to myself. And I've got literally my voice recording side note. I also use this device to track my dreams. I've got a couple of courses on lucid dreaming, once again, check those out. One of the things that you do when lucid dreaming is write down your dreams. Now personally, I find that waking up in the middle of the night and trying to turn on the light and write down in pen, it's very frustrating to do. I've tried physical dream journals. I just don't like it. I use this to record my dreams and then when I wake up properly in the morning and I've got time to write, I'll play it back. That triggers the memory. I write it down and then I can have the memory of my dream. It's a good lucid dreaming to, but like I said, as a way for self organization, a pen and pad, a voice recorder, I think are must, at least they're must for me because they really do help to keep everything in order and allow you to not forget stuff. We have access to technology. You can also use the notes on your phone, the calendar on your phone, and encourage you to really use it, right? Think about what a mobile phone is. It's like the cave man's. It does everything for us. It helps us to guide. It helps us external source of memory. All of those things. Use the tools you've got at your disposal. 9. Clean House, Clean Mind: Okay. So a couple of tips Now, one of the tips that I found to keep a clean home is to clean as you go. I used to work at Mcdonald's. I became a manager. And one of the things that we're taught and that we pushed upon, the staff, was to clean as you go. This means that as you're cooking, you're also cleaning, right? Why do we do this? Well, the reason you do it is because if you go cook and then clean, it takes a lot of time, but there's a lot of little downtime bits in between the processes that you're doing that you can be cleaning, right? So let's take cooking in the home as you're cooking your food, right? There's times where you don't need to be touching it and stirring it and prodding the food. In those times, you head straight to the sink a little bit of dishes and then back to the cooking, right? Rather than going on your phone, rather than getting distracted doing all this stuff, just dedicate that time. Dedicate time to cooking and cleaning at the same time. This will be obvious for some people, but not so much for others. Now, when you are cleaning top as in the high shelves, why do you clean your floor first or your table first? Clean the table first because as you're cleaning, it will knock stuff onto the ground. Right. If you clean the ground first, you're now double doing that clean as you go top to bottom. Makes sense? Yeah. The other thing I want you to think of with cleaning is to do little small bits like that idea of spring cleaning where you do everything all at once. That it's a good idea in a sense that you get into that groove. But it means that if you're not doing the little bits as well, your house becomes disgusting and then it takes such a bigger job. I find it easier to just Chip away. Chip away. Chip away, Chip away. If you find that you struggle with this on your weekly planner that I talked about earlier, put in little tasks each day. Monday you might vacuum, Tuesday, you might mop, Wednesday, you do the toilets right, etcetera. Whatever needs to be done in your house as luster in. Okay? It's Monday. Today. Today is that I do this. Before I sit down and relax for the day, I'm going to do this task. That's the way that I've found it worked for me until I got into the habit of cleaning as I go and little bits. I'm harping on cleaning because our environments represent our mind. It's very hard to be calm and controlled and in a nice mental state. Your brain, if your environment is chaotic, just clean a little bit each day. Don't make it such a big job and just chip, chip, chip away. 10. Manage Your Meds: Another little organization tool that I use is a little medicine container. Here you've got days of the week across the top, and in each day you've got a morning and night. Now this is today's day, Saturday. And you'll see that I've taken the morning ones, but I haven't taken the night ones for me. I'm on some medications for my mental health and I'm also on some just supplements to make sure my body is working well. Now the reason I use a little device like that is that once again, it is a reminder I can see, okay, I've got medicine to take in the morning. Again, in my morning, set up. I take the meds at night before I go to bed. Take the meds now, yesterday, for whatever reason, I just forgot to take them. When I got home, I looked at my day and I'm like, oh, no, it's full. I came home last night and it was a full set. That suggests to me that I haven't taken my meds. Now, if I didn't have this system, if I didn't have to set up, I would be guessing. Second guessing myself. Did I take them? Did I not take them? Have I forgotten? All right. Getting yourself something like this that outlines your medicine, when you should take it morning and night. Now, there's more complex ones, there's less complex ones. I'll put a link so you can check this one out that I use. But the point is that it allows you to ensure that you're getting the things into that you need to get into you when you need to get into for those, if you're taking medicine that you must take as in like it's vital for your health, your mental or physical health. You can't afford to forget it if you're just doing it as a supplementation. Fine. Either way, don't miss a day. Why don't you want to miss a day because you're taking it for a reason? I like to have a little external reminders now, most days prior to having this, I didn't forget, there were days that I did get a little tool like this. Put your medicine in and make sure you're taking it daily. 11. Drink More Water: So this one is going to seem a little bit random, but I've got a bottle of water here right now. Drinking water is vital for our physical and mental health. And a lot of people struggle to just remember to drink and to find an excuse in yada, yada. What's the best way we can address this? The best way is to breed prepared. On the top of my fridge, I've got a bunch of water bottles that I just have pre filled on the top of the fridge that I can grab in the morning. I just grab one and I've got this bottle of water full. I don't have to find a bottle. I don't have to fill it up. It's there. It's one of the things that I just keep updating regularly. Why is this a good idea? Because I can just grab one and go. Then as I'm going I can see, okay, This is a 1.5 liter bottle. Okay. That's how much water I've drunk for the day. If I drink it through a bottle, 600 miles, I know that I've drunk that much for the day. It's a good way to guarantee that you're getting the water into you that you'd need. It might sound interesting to suggest this as an organization tool, but so many people are dehydrated, so many people aren't getting the fluids into them that they need. That's causing you to not think straight. If you're not thinking straight, how can you organize anything else in your life? How do you know if you're dehydrated? If you're thirsty, you're, well, truly dehydrated. If your urine isn't, it should be very slightly colored but basically transparent if it's colored, if it's thick, if it's anything like that, you're dehydrated. Right? Start drinking more water. In terms of how much to drink, there's a debate, but it's like the certain amount of glasses per day, whatever. But that depends on your body size, how much you exercise. The answer probably is more. Get some bottles, put them up on your thing, and just keep refilling them, right? Do it. Get some more water into your day and you'll feel and think clearer. Also side, not the more water you drink, the less other crap you drink, right? Sugar, drinks, fruit juices, all of those things have a bunch of sugar in them. It's good for you, right? Mental health wise. Physical health wise, you don't want to be gaining the weight from the sugars. Have water. 12. Get Minimalist: Let's talk other organizational things, wallet and keys, right? I used to carry or feel like I had to carry, absolutely every card that I ever got with me and absolutely every key that I ever own. Right. To get into my house, to my mom's house, to all of the little locks around the joint. Right. But then I realized it's like, why am I carrying this extra weight? I did a little sort of thinking process. I'm like, what do I actually use the most? The same thing for cards. In terms of keys. I carry a car key, a house key, and a couple of others that I use on a regular basis. That's it. As minimal as possible. Why? Because I don't want that to lug around that extra weight, right? Really think through, look at your key chain, take off all of the extra crap. You don't need all those little dangly bits. You don't need the keys that you never use right now. Like for example, your garage key, your garage key outside that you don't lock your car in, that you just have your lawn in. Right. You don't need to carry that to work with you every day. So you can open the key to the garage once a month. Right. That doesn't need to be your day to day item that you carry around. Don't carry it around. Put it somewhere separate. Just have on your person the bare minimum. That way you've got less in your pocket. There's less, just stuff that you need to carry. Apply that same logic to your cards. I've got one of these little slim cases that you flick the bottom and the cards pop out, right? This is all that I need now to work out what cards I actually needed to put in there. That's a little bit of a thinking process and a little bit of trial and error because like I said, I had a wallet, it was getting thicker and thicker and thicker with loaded cards and credit cards and pictures and all of this stuff. And I'm like, oh, it was tedious. I'll put a link so you can check out what these are as well. But basically I've got a credit card, I've got a healthcare card, I've got my license, and I've got a public transport card. That's it. That's all I've got on there, because that's all I need. Now, there will be times where I need those other cards, but once again, those times come up so rarely that I don't need to be lugging it around all the time every day. I like this push to minimalism. You might look at this and go think of it as no fact. Why do you just carry it all? Just in case? Fair enough. But for me, the soul satisfying, there's something liberating about not lugging around everything with you all at once because you don't need to. If you don't need to, it's that same mental thing of cleaning as you're going. It's the same mental approach of just decluttering. This is all I need when I come. This is all I need to carry. If it's easily in my pockets and I'm off and I'm ready to go, it helps me to feel organized because I'm like, okay, that's the bare minimum of what I need here. 13. Desk Organization: On my desk. I've got a few of these guys, these are a little organization. Compartment boxes. In each of those, I have a label on the front. This one's called Lucidity, that's going to be the name of my next book. The idea is that anything that I'm writing about, talking about, creating, to do with lucidity, goes in this box so that I don't have to have a hassle or a struggle to search for it. Where is it? But don't put the papers here. I put them there all over the place. This is where they go. I'm looking over at my desk now. I've got some random projects. I've got stuff for podcasts. I've got stuff for future projects, each allotted into its own little box. The idea being is that I can find use it when necessary. On the side here, I've got a little USB that's a little back up USB so that I don't lose my work. Right? The point is this, if you find that you're struggling to organize yourself, if you find that you're struggling to find where things are, that's costing you time and mental space. Organize, put them into certain tasks. Now once again, for me, it becomes a writing thing. This is where I put my books stuff, this is where I put my podcast stuff. This is where I put my random assortment stuff. Each one has a different pile for you. The piles will be different. It's in the pile. I've got different things that I'm working on. I've got bad cliff. I've sorted it out. So I know that were in this pile, things are it's good for things to have places. If you don't know where things go, you're constantly and repeatedly and forever wasting a bunch of time, finding the thing. Eliminate that. Make a spot for stuff. Put little labels on it. I've put a little label on here. It looks a bit old and ready, Doesn't matter. I can look at it at a glance, go, oh, that's where the lucidity stuff is. Oh, this is where the podcast stuff is. Make labels. Find it out. Do that. Yeah. 14. Household Organization: Talking about how to organize your household. These little containers. Now, these containers come in a variety of different sizes, but I've got a stack of them here, right? What do we use these for? Well, there's a variety of different options. But do you know how inside your drawers, there's just things just flying around everywhere? Would it be good if you knew where they all were? Or for example, you've got a bunch of ****** that you just disheveled. The organized them in little containers. The uses for these are endless. But they're so useful that it just, once again, it helps you to find and have things in a specific place. It means that when you use something, you've got a place to put it back. Now if you wanted to, you could put little labels on the top of these. For example, ******, for example, flavorings. For example, pens, for example, I don't know, batteries. Right? Whatever you decide that you need to organize little things that you can put them side by side by side. And then in your drawers, you look and you're like, oh, that's where this thing is. It's organized and it's set out, it's not haphazard. I'm a massive believer of not wasting time repeatedly searching and doing the same task. Okay, this takes a little bit of effort to set up, all the stuff I'm doing, takes effort to set up. But once it's set up, your life gets organized and then it's easier. It's like that, it's extreme. But the analogy is like a giving birth analogy. It's a long process, a lot of effort. But then you've got the child right. This whole thing to set up your house and to get organized the stuff overtime. Getting it set up is quite hard. But once it's set up, it's done and it's working. The good thing about this is you can chip away with any of the stuff I've said. You can do one thing, get that locked down. Do the next thing, get it locked down. Do the next thing, get it locked down. Yeah. 15. Functionality Before Perfection: A tip that I want you to consider with any self improvement, with any organization thing is to get yourself started at a bare minimum and then try and get it to perfect. What do I mean by this? Let's say you're doing a weekly plan or the project plan, or any of the things that I'm suggesting in this video. There's a risk of doing that one thing to the extreme and not doing anything else. But the thing is, all of these things work together, right? Organizing your house, making it clean. Organizing your day. Getting little boxes and stuff to put your stuff in, right? All of this stuff sinks in and works together. What I suggest you do is get it all to a functional level first. If ten is perfect, zero is not ideal, get it all at level two. Once you're all set up at a level two, bump them all up to a level five. Once they're all at a level five, keep bumping them up. The idea is that you're acknowledging that it's all working as a system. The thing is, if you try to make one thing perfect and then make the next thing perfect, and go through that. By the time you circle back around to this first thing, this thing won't be working for you. It can't, because everything has to twist and change as an evolving process. Because you don't know what you don't know yet. For example, if I pull up this organization thing that I was talking about before, that's like the fifth or sixth iteration. It's my fifth or sixth attempt to make a project planner work. I've tried it on my phone, I've tried it straight in front of the computer front, a bunch of different things. At the time those things worked, they didn't work as well as this one, But that's okay. They started to work with that organization in place. I was then able to start focusing on other stuff and other stuff, and other stuff and other stuff. And once that was all sorted, I could come back to the organization chart and get that organized, right? Do you see what I'm going for here? So just be aware that it's better to get it functional than perfect, at least first. Now once you get everything locked down, then you can start chipping away and making them better. Just strongly encourage, get the things sorted. The analogy or the example that I like was a friend of mine had a business. Rather than doing this functional approach, he decided to spend a lot of time working on his logo, on his website. The problem is, he spent so much time, so much, so much money on those things that his passion and his resources dropped away before he even opened for business. He wasted too much time and effort on that stuff. The better approach would be to pick a logo, get started, have a basic website, get started, get the basic stock in, get started, right, get it all functional. And then put out the spot fires and chip away and get it all organized That way he might have still been in business doing his passion, but he let it drop away because he wanted the perfect logo. I don't blame him for wanting the perfect logo, but you've got to step back and look at the whole project. That perfect logo is irrelevant, is useless to him now because the project itself is dead. I suggest you get the bare functionality and then chip away at them all. 16. Cue Cards: All right. So what I've got here is some cards. I really like cards. And I have a pile of these on my desk. This is part of that pile. Every day I do a couple of things with them if I need to take random notes and take them with me. Here we go. If I've got a to do list for the day we're on it, if I need to just stick things up that I want to remember that a bit more permanent. I've got them on my window, they're there, right? Multiple, multiple uses. Just to have a pile of cards because there will be times that I will need to do those quick. To do lists, do these little ideas. And having a stack of papers there is great. The great idea of these cards is you can write them up and cross them off. It's awesome. There's something to be said about crossing things off to do list. I know it sounds silly for me to say, hey, recommend cards. I'll put a link so you can grab some of these for yourself. But the point is is that they actually work because they're visibly there. You can physically see them. I prefer these two notes on my phone because when you're looking through the notes on your phone, they can get put away in the sense that it's hard to see. They're not physically an item. If this is stuck up with blue tag on my wall, I can see it. I can cross it off and it's done. That's just how I work. You might find that notes on your phone. Suffice. Once again, like I said at the start of the video, that's okay for me. Writing it up, crossing up, sticking it on the wall, it's a great little tool to have. 17. Class Project Time: A class project time. I want to consider all of the things that we've looked over. The weekly planner, the task planner, the little containers to organize yourself, whatever it is, right? I want you to pick one of those things and start making progress on it. Choose one, get it going. And then I just want you to write down, say, hey, I've got a weekly planner in it, this is what it looks like. Just give me a very, very brief overview and let me know how it's impacting you or how you think it will impact you. It's important with all of the courses that I've got online and everyone's got that you don't just think about it. This course is useless if you're like, oh, I'll do the thing you want. Actually do it. Actually get a note pattern pen and put it in your pocket. Actually get some cards. Actually start cleaning as you go. Right. Whatever it is, do it. Because if you don't do it, you don't practice it. Nothing will change, right? Or it'll be a very slow change. So I encourage you, choose one of the things, implement it in your life. Give me a little brief summary of what you did and how it's impacting you. You can also use this class project as a way to just ask me any questions. Let me know if there's something that I haven't covered or something you want me to go deeper on. If you want to do another one of these courses and be like, hey, I'm struggling to organize myself in this way, how can I do it? Zach ask me, and I'll make another course for you, or I'll at least answer you in person, or I'll do a podcast on. I'll get the information to you for that purpose. Yeah, do something. Tell me about it, ask me the questions. Actually do it so you can make these positive changes in your life, please. 18. Quick Recap: A quick summary of getting organized tips and tricks. If you check out the resources tab, I will have a bunch of pictures for all of the things that I've got on line so you can check it out. I'll put some links so you can check out all of the stuff that I use for yourself. But the point that I want you to remind you of is this. Yeah, Just start start chipping away and realize that how I do it might not be the way that you're going to eventually do it. Start, get yourself up to a level standard and then chip away. If you don't start, it's never going to change. And it might seem overwhelming to implement all these changes in your life. You don't have to just chip, chip, chip, chip away and realize it's not going to be perfect until you work on it and work through it and refine it and tweak it, but get stuff happening and realize it doesn't have to be perfect the first time. It's not going to be perfect the first time. That's impossible, but start making those changes. You'll see above it says rate and review this course. Please do so. Let me know what I can improve upon what you like, what sort of courses you'd like to see me from in the future. As a side note, it just makes me feel great that I'm getting so many positive reviews and you guys are loving it. Let me know what you think and check it out if you want to check out my blogs, my podcasts, all of the stuff that I'm doing online, head over to my website, Zachary hyphen Phillips.com or check me out on social media at Zac Phillips. Yeah, I just want to say thank you for the ongoing support that you guys are giving me. Skillshare is really starting to become a massive hub of a lot of the stuff I'm doing. And it's only through your support, your reviews, your studentship that this is possible. Thank you once again, like I said, at review. And let me know what courses you're like in the future. Cheers.