Life can be quite complicated, going in one direction and then suddenly spinning to the opposite extreme. It’s almost as if you feel dizzy when the changes level out. So, yes, life is interesting like that, and it takes strength to endure sometimes. You may look at others and think, “Boy, they have a lucky life,” but the thing is, you are in control, even when you feel like you’re not.
Can You Make Your Own Luck in Life?
To avoid living a life that feels like it’s perpetually spinning out of control, you need to get yourself organized. You see, it starts with you, but no lucky life. However, creating an organizational self-mastery framework for your personal and professional priorities can greatly help you maximize your time in all areas and enhance the quality of your peace of mind and enjoyment of life. Now, whether you make your own luck, that’s debatable. But you can affect change in your life. Here’s how.
Develop Healthy Habits
Habits and daily routines help define the person you are and the one you want to be. Your deepest beliefs about yourself are very much evident in the things that you habitually do. Whether your repetitive pattern of behavior involves lounging around like a couch potato or constantly rushing from one thing to the next, you become that habit over time.
Solidified habits that don’t support your personal growth spoil your best efforts and drain your energy, time, and finances. Healthy habits, however, make you feel good about yourself and help you build a strong foundation for long-term success.
As habits are formed through routines that determine your actions (without much conscious thought involved), to develop healthy habits, you must be mindful.
How to Make Your Life Work
Create a double-column list of your work and home life habits. Then, on the left side, write down your current habits like this:
Work – Working extra hours is the norm
Home – All free time spent in front of the TV
Social life – too tired to make time for friends and family
Food – Order takeaways 2-3 times per week
Health – Too busy to exercise
Sleep – 5 hours tops
Use the column on the right side to edit your current habits and write down what you would love to do instead.
Work – Have set boundaries between 9-5
Home – Catch up on reading or take up a new hobby
Social life – Spend quality time with friends and family
Food – Practice my culinary skills
Health – Exercise at least twice a week
Sleep – Enjoy 8 hours of good quality sleep every night
Giving your habits a healthy overhaul will help you become the person that you want to be.
Build A Routine
A little planning can go a long way when you’re organizing your lifestyle. Mapping out days and weeks in a diary, planner, calendar or app helps to simplify your routine. At a glance, you can instantly identify what you need to do to get something done – at work or in your personal life.
- Time block your days with jobs, tasks, and chores that are the most important.
- Allow some extra time – overestimating how long a task will take you is better than not having enough time to get it done.
- Schedule in the little things that add up – grocery shopping, meal prep, laundry, cleaning, etc
- Time block your downtime – include family time, ‘me’ time, and sleep
- Dedicate one hour a week for the routine planning of the next week
Be Consistent
In the grand scheme of accomplishing self-mastery and living an organized life, having an all-or-nothing attitude can be self-sabotaging. To make continued progress, you need to swap perfection and unrealistic expectations (that set you up to fail) with consistency.
Compounding effort helps keep you on track and allows you to see the positive impact that your incremental progress is making week-to-week and month-to-month.
Ditch the unrealistic plans to exercise every day, never order a takeaway or stop watching your favorite soaps on TV. Established bad habits are difficult to break overnight. Instead, it’s best to aim for consistent improvement in your habits and routines.
Prioritize
In the principles of organized living, juggling less means having more time to do as you please. But, unfortunately, while you’re doing your best to organize daily routines and skillfully maintaining them, life may throw you a curveball.
To minimize the impact on your organized living, it’s crucial to have a priority list of goals. Learn to say “No” to people and things that disrupt your schedule. If you must take on additional tasks, make sure that you allocate time and space after completing your highest and most important goals first.
When you know where you need to focus your time and energy, you’re better equipped to make efficient decisions that make you more productive.
Prioritize things that:
- Make you happy
- Serve your goals
- Save you time
- Provide opportunities for self-mastery growth
Simplify
It’s challenging to feel that your life is organized when your mind is overwhelmed with chaotic thoughts and your surroundings are a mess. However, the practice of simplifying creates more calm, serenity, harmony, and space in your mind and your environment.
In the workplace, be ruthless about clearing clutter on your desk and organizing files and folders. So that your mind is free to focus on the workload that matters, use tools that clear digital chaos, like an inbox that’s overflowing with messages you haven’t read.
Focus on high-impact projects that show off your knowledge and skills, and delegate the small stuff that eats up your time and energy.
To minimize the risk of burnout, give your work 100% but always clock off on time. Also, avoid replying to after-hours emails and team chat messages unless it’s an emergency.
At home, make sure that you unplug from work at the weekend. Instead, spend time with family and friends and doing things that you enjoy. Rest and recovery is a principle of organized living that is equally important as a to-do list or a clutter-free environment.
To simplify your daily, weekly, and monthly chores, tackle household habits immediately instead of letting them pile up. Then, when you know that everything in your home runs smoothly, you can kick back and relax.
Outsource
You have a wealth of resources available to enable you to outsource and automate your life. These resources allow for personal growth and rest.
Repetitive manual tasks, like grocery shopping, paying bills, and sending emails, can easily be completed with website or app support if you have the money to pay for services, outsource chores to someone else to save time.
Find Balance
It’s not easy to find the perfect balance if you have a hectic lifestyle. For priority long-term sustainability and your wellbeing, you must have strategies in place for combating stress, lethargy, stagnancy, and burnout. It’s not about that lucky life or charmed life that you think others have. It all boils down to finding balance for yourself by taking many courses of action.
Find equilibrium by:
- Taking regular breaks when you’re working on longer tasks.
- Prioritizing physical activity, like walking, hiking, exercise, swimming, or dancing.
- Cultivating a ‘me time’ practice includes meditation, yoga, journaling, and/or quiet contemplation.
- Unwinding with quality entertainment, such as your favorite movies or a good book.
- Spending time in the company of the people you love.
- Treating your body like a temple and feasting on healthy, nutritious foods.
- Getting plenty of relaxation and sleep.
Have You Met Lady Luck?
So, have you found the secret to good luck yet? I didn’t think so? You see, it’s not about luck at all. It’s about doing things on purpose. To ensure that you’re maintaining the principles of organized living, it’s a good idea to have a regular weekly/monthly review of your good habits and routines.
Measure the progress towards your goals, and implement any necessary changes that benefit self-mastery and enhance your wellbeing. And if you’re naturally super organized, you could focus your attention on pruning priorities down to the essentials so that you have more free time for yourself. So I guess it’s okay to have a happy-go-lucky mindset at times but remember, you create your own destiny.