My Top Three Tips for Staying Organized

If you are struggling to stay organized or to get organized you are not alone! With each new season of our lives come new challenges and different organizing strategies and solutions need to be found. Being organized is definitely a process as well as a mental habit.

Photo by Angelina Litvin

My top three tips for staying organized even if you are feeling overwhelmed:

1. Use a diary/planner/bullet journal and keep all your appointments and to-do lists in one place. Having scraps of paper here and there can make it difficult to keep track of everything - so centralize them all into one place.
2. Have a place for everything and put items back in their places. Where you would first think of looking for something is probably a good place to keep it. If it is too difficult to put something back it might mean you are keeping it in the wrong place. Make everything you use regularly easy to access and to put away again.
3. Try to keep surfaces clear. It is so much easier to clean (and also to relax) if you are not confronted by piles of things on various surfaces. If things are piling up it is a sign to do a clean up. If you need to do a major organizing session some good advice is to use the  PROCESS method by the Organizing Junkie. She goes through some logical and helpful steps to take when doing a tidying project - big or small.

What are your top tips for staying on top of the chaos?  Do you have any tried and tested ways to stay organized?

Creating a Visual Schedule

One of my favourite quotes is an old proverb, "The palest ink is better then the best memory".  I just can't keep all the things I need to do and remember in my head, so I am a great believer in writing them all down.

One of the tools I like to use as a visual reminder of routines throughout the week is a "visual schedule" that the whole family can check. This is especially useful for my young daughter who has various school activities for which she needs to pack various things each day.

Photo by Tristan Colangelo

A visual schedule is easy to create with pen and paper - it is really just a chart that lays out the days of the week and items and activities to remember each day. I prefer to use a table in a word document that I can adapt each school term as our activities change. I like to put the days of the week down the left hand side column and then list the activities and reminders in the right hand column next to the days.

I also like to add "clipart" or small drawings that are graphic reminders of each important activity. For example, a picture of a swimming costume on days that there is swimming and she needs to pack her swimming kit.

A helpful tip is also to have the schedule in more than one place if necessary, in our case there needs to be one in my daughter's room as well as one on our fridge.

Another tip is to print out or draw the schedule on colourful paper so that it stands out in the mass of other paperwork and reminders that might be on your noticeboard. If the visual schedule is eye catching then it is easy to refer to each day.

I have tried printing out a schedule each week so that I can add notes to it, but for our family it works better just to use one visual schedule per school term that is only changed if our regular weekly activities change. Perhaps an idea would be to laminate the schedule so that it is possible to write on it and then wipe it down each week for new notes?

What are your tips for organising a family schedule? Do you use a calendar or a weekly visual schedule or both? Please comment with what works well for you and your family.