Life is busier and more hectic than ever before! With so much going on in the world around us, it can be difficult to maintain and keep up with all of life’s responsibilities and deadlines. One of the most important characteristics to staying on top of your work, feeling confident in your abilities and remaining in control of your success is by dedicating yourself to organization. In this article, we’ve outlined what we find to be some of the most vital organizational tips and useful apps to keep you in the driver’s seat of your life, even during the busiest of times!
The Best Organizational Tips
Don’t Procrastinate, Prioritize!
The longer you put something off, the harder it becomes to get started. Letting your responsibilities pile up causes unnecessary stress and prevents you from fulfilling the task’s requirements to the best of your abilities. Motivate yourself to complete your assignments by working at them for a reasonable amount of time each day. It is much easier to dedicate yourself to a particular task for 30 minutes a day than it is to work on it for 3 hours the day before the deadline (and you will thank yourself later!). In addition to ridding yourself from procrastination, breaking up your intimidating tasks by prioritizing based on importance or upcoming deadlines can make a huge difference. Ranking your responsibilities allows the most pressing tasks to be given the attention they require and ensures they will be done on time. Find a pattern for your workflow that best suits your lifestyle and grant yourself the adequate time needed to complete each task and you will never have to worry about falling behind or forgetting about an important task again!
Keep Your Study Space Tidy
A great way to remain organized is by allotting a certain amount of time during the day dedicated to decluttering and cleaning up your work space. Creating a designated home for all of your belongings helps to ensure the cleanliness and easy mobility of your space while also allowing you to remain focused on the task at hand, rather than becoming distracted by your surroundings. Once you’ve decided on a distinct location for all of your items, it is very important to maintain the system you have created. Things can pile up quickly so in order to keep the calm and organized ambiance of your area, it is important to put things away immediately after you’re done using them. This practice only takes a few minutes but it’ll save you a lot of cleaning time later on. Doing this will take time and practice, however, after a while you’ll see how easy it is to locate what you need when everything in your space has a home.
Create a To-Do List
Life moves fast and ideas move even faster! Keeping some form of written or typed document where you can store your to-do lists and other information allows you to free yourself of the worrying thought “am I forgetting something?” There are many different methods for creating this type of organization in your life. Many people prefer a physical reminder such as a whiteboard or calendar while others enjoy utilizing technology. For those who are interested in phones and laptops rather than paper and pens, we have selected three of the most highly rated and reviewed note-taking and organizational apps available to help you create the most efficient and structured lifestyle.
The Best Organizational Apps
Evernote
Evernote is rated as an Editor’s Choice in the app store and is positively reviewed by thousands! This app offers three separate plans to best suit any individual’s needs. The first plan is completely free and offers many great benefits. The free version auto-syncs to two of your devices, therefore you can access your notes from anywhere, even if you’re offline. Whether you’re looking for privacy or wanting a friend to see your newest ideas, Evernote offers a passcode lock for mobile devices as well as easy sharing with anyone of your choosing, even if they don’t have an Evernote account of their own. If you prefer handwriting over typing, Evernote considers themselves to be a scanner in your pocket as you can quickly capture all your handwritten ideas and notes with their built-in camera on Android and Apple devices. It can read your handwriting and identify 28 typewritten and 11 handwritten languages which can be selected by changing the Recognition Language setting. For those who prefer speaking and voice-to-text options, Evernote utilizes a version of Siri. This allows you to create, update, or search your note by voice command. This application makes it easy to organize your notes and it utilizes the unique method of tagging. Tagging notes with keywords sorts them by category, even if they’re saved in different notebooks. In addition, Evernote offers a browser extension that lets you hold onto anything you find on the web. This can include whole pages, articles, recipes, images, PDFs and more. Your clips are automatically stored with the notebooks and tags of your choosing making them easily accessible. Overall, the free plan of Evernote offers 60 MB of uploads per month which grants the user lots of room for creating notes and organizing their lives.
Awesome Note
Awesome Note allows you to access your notes, reminders, calendars, to-do lists and more all in one place. Every aspect of this app is incredibly customizable and user-friendly and for these reasons, it is highly reviewed and raved about by many. You can create detailed notes that can be tailored specifically to your wants and needs by attaching photos, voice memos, drawings, a map of your location and the weather! You can also format each note to look as professional or as aesthetically pleasing as you like by selecting different fonts, sizing and colours. Awesome Note offers the option of adding an alarm or countdown reminder to the notes that you do not want to forget. This can be useful for grocery or other shopping lists, upcoming deadlines or special occasions. The notes created can be organized into specific folders and you change the colour and folder icons to match its theme. This useful app is available on both iOS and Android, but keep in mind, this one does cost a few dollars!
Trello
Our last recommendation for some of the best organizational apps on the market is Trello! Trello is a free app available for iOS and Android with over 35 million registered users. It is a terrific tool for both individual and collaborative task management. The visual Kanban boards allow you to separate your tasks into individual cards where you can add descriptions, comments, checklists, other people, deadlines and a progress meter. These cards can be separated into three categories: 1. To Do, 2. Doing and 3. Done while still allowing you to view your responsibilities for the day from a bird’s eye view. The shareable nature of this app has made Trello incredibly popular for organizing team tasks and can be used for both school projects and workplace collaborative efforts. But Trello isn't just for work! It can be used to organize just about any aspect of your life ranging from your day off plans to a high profile event. Many individuals even utilize Trello as a scheduling app as you can use lists to create time blocks in order to schedule your day into increments based on particular tasks. Once you’ve determined your time frames, you can easily move tasks around as needed throughout the day and quickly identify the type of task using labels (such as schoolwork, family, work, household, etc.). Having all of your tasks in one place is extremely helpful when it comes to getting things done as it allows you to see the whole picture while still being able to focus on one duty at a time.
We hope you found value in these tips and app recommendations and that you choose to implement some of them into your life to help you become the most organized and successful you can be. If you give any of these a try, let us know how it goes for you on our Instagram or Facebook page!