A manager once told me I am the most highly motivated and organized person he knows. I appreciated those words, and I would like to share with you how I stay organized in the hope it will inspire you to be more organized in your own life.

The core of my system is storing my email in a categorized system of folders, keeping a prioritized and ordered list of tasks that I am working on, tracking my appointments, meetings, and other upcoming commitments on my calendar, and using a system of daily action plans, weekly objectives, and monthly objectives to keep me focused and on track.

Organizing Your Email

If you want to easily find information in the emails you send and receive, I recommend keeping a system of folders where you store emails by category. This will allow you to quickly and easily find an email for a particular subject.

For example, when I have an upcoming meeting, I keep all emails related to that meeting in a folder named after that meeting. I also keep separate folders for each project I am working on. This allows me to find an email for a meeting or a project without having to search every email I have sent and received. Instead, I just browse to the folder for the project I am working on, and I find only the emails pertaining to that project.

Organizing Your Workload

When you get assigned tasks at work, you can stay organized by creating tasks in a task management program like Microsoft Outlook. You can even prioritize your tasks to make it easy to find your most important and urgent tasks among a large to-do list.

One trick I use at work is to put a number at the beginning of the name of every task that I add to Outlook and to sort my tasks by name. Because I include numbers in my task names, that means the software sorts my tasks by number, which puts my highest priority task at the start of the list. My highest priority tasks gets assigned the number 1, the next highest is 2, and so forth. The sorting done by the software then sorts my tasks so that the task name starting with 1 appears at the start of list, with task number 2 coming next, and so on.

I also organize the information I receive at work by capturing notes in Microsoft OneNote, and I use OneNote at home as well. I use different notebooks, as well as different sections in each notebook, to categorize the information I capture. This makes it much faster to find a pertinent piece of information when I need to look it up. Instead of having a disorganized collection of notes, I keep a well categorized and sorted set of notebooks and notebook sections which makes it much easier to find the information I am looking for.

Using a Calendar

I also take advantage of the calendar app on my phone, which syncs with the Outlook app’s calendar on my computer. I track all the commitments I make with other people on my calendar, including appointments, meetings, and other events. I also turn on reminders for calendar entries to help me remember these commitments.

I will also schedule appointments with myself on my calendar when there is something important I want to do. Having this on my calendar helps me to remember this commitment I made to myself, and I treat it with the same level of importance I would give to an appointment with another person.

Action Plans and Objectives

Another way I stay organized is to have daily action plans, weekly objectives, and monthly goals. Each month I set at least 4 goals I want to achieve that month. This helps me to stay focused during the month and to work towards achieving those goals. I also set objectives for each week, and I create daily action plans to help me fulfill my weekly and monthly objectives.

Having daily action plans helps me to be organized with what I want to achieve each day. It also helps me to be organized longer term because I can add action items to my action items list for a given day of the week when something comes up during the day that I don’t have time to handle in the moment but adding it as an action item for a future day helps to ensure I get it done.

Planning out my week with daily action plans helps to organize and prioritize what I want to do each day of the week. For example, I schedule the time when I prepare the agendas for my Toastmasters club. I also plan when I write my blog articles.

Conclusion

For me, being organized is about having a system of notes and reminders to help me remember everything I need and want to do in life. I categorize my notes to make them easy to find later. I also prioritize my to-do list to help me get the right things done. I also store and categorize the email I send and receive to make it easier to find in the future. I also use a system of daily actions plans, weekly objectives, and monthly objectives to stay focused and to help me fulfill my responsibilities and to achieve what I want in life.

The power of my system is that I organize the information I receive in life for easy access later. I also keep track of all the commitments I make to ensure that I fulfill my responsibilities and that I don’t miss an important meeting or event.

I encourage you to be more organized as well. Start organizing the email you receive and the notes you take. Prioritize and organize your to-do list and use your calendar. Also create daily action plans, set weekly objectives, and monthly objectives. All of these systems will help you to stay sane in a busy world, and they can help you to be more organized.