You’re constantly scrambling to stay on top of your everyday activities. When something unexpected like a doctors visit comes up, you’re in a panic to rearrange your day to fit in the appointment that was scheduled months ago. Not everyone enjoys living a life that’s planned out in exact detail, and that’s okay. You don’t have to have a desire to plan out your entire month to benefit from being more organized in your day to day life. When it feels like you’re not able to stay ahead of your responsibilities in life or you feel as though everyone else seems to have their life together in a way that you don’t, it’s time to start strategizing to find ways to bring some predictability to your routine. Becoming more organized in your everyday life doesn’t mean you have to throw away your spontaneous side. Being organized will only help you manage your time better so you can enjoy your life.
10. Meeting Time Mixups
You’re phone rings. You look down and see it’s your kids dentist office calling. That sense of dread that overcomes you when you realize that the kids had a dental appointment today. Sound familiar? You’re constantly scrambling to get to appointments and meetings on time, becoming more organized will help you stay on top of those events outside of your routine. Using a digital or paper planner, or your phone’s calendar app is a great way to stay on top of your life’s demands. The important thing is using something that you will look at daily. There’s no sense in writing down an appointment time if what you’re writing on will only get lost in the shuffle before the end of the day.
9. You Can’t Find Your Stuff
You need to leave your house now, but you realize your keys are missing. You look in your purse, sweep the living room, kitchen, laundry baskets, nada. Then your cell phone rings and while you can hear it, you have no idea where it actually is. Constantly misplacing important items is a sure sign you need more organization in your life. This doesn’t mean you have to have a specific spot for everything in your house if you don’t want to. You can simply have a general area, like a dish or hook for your house and car keys, or a convenient spot on the in your nightstand to leave your checkbook. Having a set spot to put items you use daily creates a routine you can depend on when you need to find your things.
8. You’re a Hot Mess Mom
The Hot Mess Mom is something most all of us moms can relate to. It seems that if we’re relaxed, easy going, or slowing down in any way that we’re going to miss something vital and we’ll struggle to recover from our mishap for the next week. While it’s normal to feel pressured to constantly be doing something, you’re taking the hot mess mom identity to a new level. You never can remember who has practice when or what time you scheduled that parent teacher conference for. This is again, where a planner, especially a family oriented one comes in handy. Having a central place to keep track of all the important things you need to accomplish in a day can help you feel like you’ve got control of your day to day activities.
7. Budget Issues
You’ve paid all your bills for the next week and are happy with where your bank account is sitting. After a fun weekend of relaxing and splurging on dinner, you check your bank account only to see that you’re a hundred dollars short of what you thought should be. If you find you’re constantly struggling to keep track of your money, a budget can go a long way in simplifying your spending and nailing down times when you’re not as smart with your money. Simple rules such as only spending a set amount on the weekends (put aside in cash before hand), or instating no spend weekends are simple ways to reign in your spending.
6. Can’t Stick to a Routine
You’ve decided this is the week you take charge of your life and get organized. You have a plan, or at least a rough idea of how you want things to be and you go hard for those first few days. Then Wednesday comes and your plan gets pushed aside because you worked late, Thursday you realize you didn’t prep enough food for the kids so they’re getting hot lunch. By Friday, you’ve given up and accepted the chaos with a heavy sigh of defeat. Sound familiar? If you crave the consistency of a routine but struggle to stick with it, you need to start smaller. Make a small change each week that you can master before changing up anything else. Soon, you’ll have a new routine that feels more streamlined and manageable.
5. Always Playing Catch Up
You’re behind on laundry, the dishes aren’t done, and you’ve neglected deep cleaning your bathrooms for another week. You work hard to keep your house in order, but things aren’t coming together the way you’d like. If it feels like all you do is play catch up on the housework, adding more structure can help ensure things are done more efficiently. If you’re the one doing all the housework, your family needs to chip in more. Having a set day of the week to tackle big chores or making a chore chart for your kids, find a way to strategize about when certain chores will get done and who’s responsible for accomplishing each task.
4. Clutter Problems
A cleaning routine isn’t your problem. You have a good structure to how and when you keep your house and work life organized. Whether it’s your desk or your living room, it doesn’t matter how regularly you clean it, it always dissolves into a chaotic mess of clutter in a few days time. Clutter can mean you either don’t have enough organization going on or you simply have too much stuff. If you need organization, Pinterest can be your best friend for organizing most any part of your home. If you need to declutter, check out our various articles on how to declutter your home.
3. Grass is Greener Feeling
You walk into your friends house for a party and wonder how they do it. How do they find the time to sort though everything, keep it all in good shape, and have their decorating on point? It is easy to feel that everyone else must have some secret helping them to keep their life and home in order, when in fact, it’s just a matter of routine. No one’s life is easy all the time, but people who are able to manage it easier have to have some sort of structure and routine to their lives that lets them accomplish things well. If you have a friend who always seems to have it together, ask them for advice on how they keep things under control.
2. Kids Have Bad Habits
Most kids would rather play than clean their rooms, but when it feels like your kids are anything but consistent with keeping their rooms clean or helping out around the time, something needs to change. Sure, there will be resistance at first, but when your kids clear cut chores to follow and know how to organize their things well, everyone will benefit. Your family should be a team effort in everything, including keeping their things in order (most of the time). If you need help organizing your kid’s toys, check out our article 5 Tips to Get Your Toy Room Under Control. If your kids need some motivation, come up with a fun reward (like a movie night in or special meal) for completing all their cleaning/organizing tasks in a week.
1. No Me Time
One of the easiest ways to know that you need to be more organized in your life is that you don’t have any “me” time. Taking time out for yourself is hard to do when you’re a mother, as someone always needs something, but if you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll burn out. If you do nothing else to organize your life more this week, carve out some dedicated time for yourself to do something that makes you happy. Take a bath, read your favorite book, go out for a paint and wine night with your friends, do something that will let you recharge your sense of self. Taking time out for yourself helps improve your family life by giving you a renewed sense of focus on keeping your family’s life in order.
Conclusion
Brining organization into your life can be a process, but making any progress is better than feeling like you’re exhausted and unorganized all of the time. If you can focus on the areas of your life that feel the most unorganized first and find solutions to solve those problems, you’ll begin to gain momentum and confidence in your ability to juggle all of your tasks. Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of your friends and partner when it comes to reorganizing or decluttering your home. The sooner you start making realistic changes to your daily routine, the sooner you’ll feel comfortable with managing your chaotic life. Organized chaos may be exhausting, but it’s better than operating with no sense of direction.
What ways do you stay organized? Do you use apps or other tricks to stay on top of things? Feel free to share your tips in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay.
