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Organization is essential to reduce the stressors that arise from chaos. While it’s impossible to have a perfectly predictable life, organizing your finances, your home, and your time will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time and energy to get it all done.
1) Organize Your Finances
Organize your finances by doing the following things: figure out your financial goals, track your spending, create a budget, and determine your net worth. Doing these things also helps you build a habit of regularly putting money into a savings account, paying your bills on time so that you can avoid bank charges, and maintaining a solid credit report and keeping your credit score as high as possible.
You should also get insurance for your home, health, and car as well as have sufficient life insurance to take care of your family should you accidentally pass away because of an accident or illness.
Since it’s often difficult to predict how much life insurance to invest in, you may wonder, “how much life insurance do I need?” One way to estimate a realistic amount is to use the DIME formula. DIME is an acronym for debt, income, mortgage, and education.
Here is how DIME works:
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Calculate your family’s future debt by adding all your fixed expenses and loans. Exclude your mortgage and include your estimated funeral expenses.
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Calculate your family’s future income by multiplying your current income by how many years your family will need financial support.
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Calculate your mortgage by how much time you need to pay off your mortgage.
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Calculate your children’s educational expenses by estimating how much time it will take for your child to graduate from college.
2) Organize Your Home
While there are many ways to organize your home according to your preferences, one of the most challenging things you may find is organizing your kid spaces. You should organize this space according to your children’s interests and needs. You also need to figure out a way to let them play with their toys and then put them away in a convenient place for easy access.
3) Organize Your Time
While organizing your finances and home may have been challenging, they follow a certain logic. Time, on the other hand, is much more elusive to organize. It often seems to slip outside our control because some things take longer than we expect, because we get too tired to complete the items on our list, or because other people or events interfere with our perfect plan to get everything done.
Although there are many time-management systems, they rarely work reliably all the time. Still, it’s better to follow an imperfect strategy to manage your time than to have no system in place at all.
With that caveat, here are some useful tips to manage your time better:
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Figure out where your time goes. Do a time audit by writing everything you do in a day. If you do a variety of things on different days, then you may have to audit the entire week. Knowing where your time goes will make it easier to figure out your priorities and create a realistic schedule.
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Set a time limit on your tasks. This strategy will prevent you from spending too much time on certain tasks and running out of time to do other things you had planned.
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Create a to-do list. As you go through your day, you will come across many things that also require your attention. Rather than letting this ruin your schedule, keep track of the things you need to do by creating a list.
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Be flexible. If there are things that need your urgent attention, then substitute the new event with what you had planned. Later, get back to your original schedule.
Admittedly, organizing your life can seem like a daunting task, but unless you get good at this skill, you cannot achieve the success you envision for yourself.