Today is “Organize Your Home” day, so following on from Monday’s post on clearing your desk, let’s take a look at other aspects of organization that you can implement to make your home run more smoothly. I should point out right at the start that I don’t have kids and I’m not a ‘domestic’ guru – I’m simply sharing the tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years and applying them to the household. If you’re juggling several children as well as a full-time job, maybe you can add some of your own tips to the comments section so that others can benefit, too?
In my opinion, organization falls into 2 distinct areas:
- Sorting
- Planning
Let’s look at each of those in turn.
Sorting
One of the key tricks related to organizing is to have a place for everything. I’ve seen countless people who keep all their paperwork in a shoe-box, then wonder why their finances are completely disorganized. Heck, when I first met my wife, she was horrified to see that all my paperwork was dumped just as I’d received it in a removal box, and the box was more than half full!
The only way you can keep on top of the reams of paper that seem to bombard us every day is to have a clear and simple filing system. This can either be hanging files in a filing cabinet, 2, 3, or 4-hole files on a shelf, or even a compact home file. Make sure that every category (such as electricity, car insurance, mortgage, employment, taxes, etc.) has its own section so that you always know not only where to find something, but more importantly, where to file it. If you go back to Monday’s post, you’ll see that I outlined a strategy for dealing with clutter on your desk. This same strategy can now be applied to any paperwork that comes in, with the ultimate goal that you handle the piece of paper only once.
Planning
Planning is simply a more understandable word for ‘Time Management’. However, I always find the notion of managing time quite funny as no matter what we try to do and how hard we try to do it, we all end up with the same 24 hours every day! So, rather than trying to manage time itself, we have to learn how to manage ourselves in such a way that we use the time we have available most effectively.
Also note that I’m not just talking about being efficient. Efficiency is about doing things right – effectiveness is about doing the right things right!
I find that I work best by making an overall plan each month regarding what I need to do during the following month. This gives me an overview that I can work to each week. Every weekend, I then sit down and plan out the coming week. Finally, I take a short time every evening to schedule out the next day. Doing this is the only way that I’ve found to hold down a full-time job, write 2 blogs, market on the Internet in several niches and be a loving husband – as well as fitting in time every day for God.
Take some time to think about how you can apply these ideas to your own life and please share your thoughts, tips, experiences and ideas in the comments below.
Best wishes,


As a tribute to “National Clean Your Desk Day”, I thought that now would be a good time for me to share my thoughts on clean desks. Since January is also “Get Organized Month”, this seemed like an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
Dump It
The biggest thing that I got from this book personally was from the section on persistence. This chapter takes you by the hand and works with you to put aside anything from your past that may be holding you back and essentially helps you to “get over yourself”. It’s really easy in life to procrastinate (in fact there’s a whole chapter just on dealing with procrastination in this book!) yet we all know that it’s the people who just push on, often with a grim determination, who ultimately succeed. Look at Colonel Sanders – he was told over 300 times that his chicken recipe was no good before he finally find someone who would take it on. That’s the kind of persistence that I want for you as well as for myself. It’s that persistence that reminds us that the end result will be worth all the effort.
It’s at this time of year as we look back at what we would have liked to have done better last year and what we want to do this year that people sit down and write New Years Resolutions. The challenge with this is that what the majority of people do is to write a wish list of things that they’d like to improve – if they even bother to write them down at all!
“Success comes in cans, failures in can’ts” is a popular quote in self-development circles. It’s often attributed to Brian Tracy, but I’m not sure anyone really knows the source of this powerful saying. From my own experience, I find that focusing on the first half is more powerful than thinking about the whole quote.
In the personal development world, people are always talking about setting goals. By now, we all know that goals are important, but fewer people recognize that there are right ways to set goals and wrong ways. If you go for the ‘wrong’ way, what you end up with is little more than a hope or a dream. For example, many people set goals like “My goal is to lose weight”. If I hear something like this, I always ask “how much weight, and by when?”
Much is spoken about in self-development circles regarding goal setting and its impact on a person’s results or achievements in life. In this article, we’re going to consider why goals are important to your success and what we can do to make them more effective.
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