Strategies For Simplifying Many Aspects Of Life

Introduction

There is no doubt that for many people, life has become too overwhelming.

We live in a hectic and complex world, which means that, to fit it all in, it’s imperative to prioritize, organize, and delegate.

It’s natural to want to get a lot done and to be able to point to your accomplishments, but 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.

In this guide, you’ll find a variety of strategies and tactics to help you simplify your life.

Getting Your Priorities Right

When you want to simplify your life, the first thing that must happen is to set your priorities, and this applies to 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 identify whether this task is important, urgent, or something else. This is going to help you identify tasks that you can let somebody 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, which 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, and it also helps to compare effort and 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?

You therefore need to identify all the resources any one task takes – whether it’s you, somebody 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, for example, after studying the situation you may determine to outsource.

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 somebody 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.

Do not skip this step for simplifying your life.

You can separate it out 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 at work will make your life much more straightforward.

The Power Of Being Well-Organized

There are clear benefits to being organized, and several studies point to disorganization as being one of the main reasons people suffer from anxiety at work and at home.

When people feel so busy, they feel as if they cannot function and that it is not good for them – for their home life or for their jobs.

As you simplify your life and become more organized, you’ll reap all these benefits.

• You’ll Be Able to Focus More. When you are organized, focusing on the task at hand is always more comfortable because you’re giving yourself the time to focus. Nobody is good at multitasking – studies have proved time and again that people just think they’re good at multitasking, but nobody is.
• You’ll Become More Productive. When you plan, organize, and systemize every aspect of your life, you’ll become super-productive. You’ll get more done than most people because most people don’t plan or organize in a way that makes them more productive.
• You’ll Have More Power Over Your Time. While you’re given the same 24 hours in a day as every other human being is given, the fact that you know how to use the time given is going to be a huge advantage. You’re going to feel as if you have more time even though you don’t, due to the organization of the time you have. For example, if you take a shopping list to the store, you’re less likely to have to waste time going back again.
• You’ll Experience Less Stress. The appearance of less clutter around your environment, at home and at work, will automatically reduce your stress. The main reason is that you don’t have to waste time and energy looking for things.
• You’ll Experience More Work/Life Balance. It’s easy to be overworked these days, even though many jobs don’t have the same rigid work schedules as they used to. In fact, a lot of jobs want you there as much as possible. However, when you get organized and increase your productivity over everybody else’s, nobody is going to complain when you go to your son’s ball game instead of working.
• You’ll Get Better At Setting And Achieving Goals. When you are organized, it helps you notice what is important and what is not as important. That means that you can set better goals because you know what is most valuable to you and your life. Plus, due to your organization, you will be able to implement and take action better.
• You’ll Feel More Positive Every Day. A funny thing happens when your life is organized – you just start feeling happy. The main reason is that you have fewer stress hormones running through your body. The other thing that happens is that you begin to feel successful in life – and that makes everybody happy (except your rivals and competitors, of course).
• Your Creativity Will Increase. It might seem counterproductive at first glance that organization and planning can make you more creative, but it’s true. Your mind cannot get into a creative flow if you are being interrupted all the time by other things. By setting up your environment to be creative, you will succeed.
• You’ll Have More Energy And Excitement For Each Day. Waking up and knowing that you can get through your day and feel a sense of accomplishment is going to make you feel more excitement and energy for your life. You’ll want to tackle the day because you know you will win.
• You’ll Experience More Freedom. If you are currently feeling as if all you do is work without any fun in your life, and then you set up a plan to simplify your life, you will automatically experience more freedom. Time freedom is a great thing because once you realize you have time freedom, the next thing you will realize is that you have money freedom too – and that’s powerful stuff.

Just think about how your mornings will be different if you’ve organized everything the night before.

Think about how different dinnertime will be if you’ve organized and planned.

How much fun will it be to take a Sunday to play golf instead of doing laundry because you decided to outsource it?

Your day may look different from this one, but it will be simpler when you’ve taken the time to bring organization into all aspects of your life.

The Art Of Delegation

Mastering the art of delegation is one of the skills that can totally change your life.

The problem with most people, especially women, is that they tend to think they’re the only one who can do something and do it right.

The thing to remember, though, is that “right” is often subjective. Maybe someone else can do it perfectly fine. (This is one aspect of being a perfectionist, so you may find this book helpful.)

Let’s look at some factors that can help you master the art of delegation so that you can simplify your life by leveraging other people’s time.

Hand Off The Right Type Of Tasks

First, get a handle on all the tasks that you do.

When you can organize and categorize them, you can look at ways to make each task easier to accomplish.

In some cases, you can automate them with technology, while in other cases, you’ll need to find a person to handle that task for you.

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