Organisational skills are critical to help you manage your time, being with your family, at work, or during your other activities and responsibilities. However, organisational skills can be hard to master. As an organisational freak, I have prepared 10 simple tips to help you improve your organisational skills, in order to use your time more efficiently, spend more quality time with your family, and achieve your business goals faster.
1. Create a master ‘to do’ list
Write down the most important things you need to do in the coming months and allocate reasonable or fixed deadlines. This list will represent the base for your weekly work.
2. Create a weekly ‘to do’ list
Write down everything you need to do during the week. Allocate dates or deadlines for each task, where possible. On the list, split the tasks with high and low priority. Prepare your to-do list at the end of the week for the coming week.
3. Use a planner
Plan ahead using your Outlook Calendar, a planner or other application. Use it to write down your key tasks, deadlines, meetings, travels and other important things to do. You can also go old school and use a printed calendar. (I do that, and I have it on my desk at all times.) In the planner, you can also allocate a timeframe for the most important tasks from your to-do list.
4. Take notes
Taking notes will remind you of important things you discussed with someone or you thought about. This is especially important in business meetings. From these notes you might also add tasks to your to-do list.
5. Throw away unnecessary items
Organise or throw away any unnecessary items at home and in your office space. What I usually do? I throw away, donate or sell anything I haven’t used in over 5 years.
6. Organise your home and workplace
Use binders to organise documents, use plastic folders to organise current documents by project, use drawers, shelves and cabinets to organise your workplace and home.
7. Use labels
Put labels on binders and plastic folders to organise your business documents and other items, and even on storage boxes at home. Labels will help you find very easily what you are looking for.
8. Organise your ‘to do’ documents
Have a specific area of your desk allocated for things that need to be done (papers to sign, reports to read etc.). You can use letter trays and transparent folders to sort documents, which you need to use or prepare that day or week.
9. Organise your computer
Create new folders and subfolders to organise your files, organise your desktop so you can easily find specific folders, remove duplicate files, name documents with detailed titles and delete any unnecessary apps and documents. If you are starting your first business, it is easier to organise everything from the beginning and then open new folders and subfolders as you proceed further.
10. Make regular backups
On your weekly (or monthly) to-do list, make a note when to do your regular documents backups on the Cloud or on a hard drive.
Summary
The main purpose of the tips shared in this article is to help you organise your work and private activities and optimise your time and efficiency in executing them. To summarise, these are the 10 tips that can help you improve your organisational skills:
- Create a master ‘to do’ list
- Create a weekly ‘to do’ list
- Use a planner
- Take notes
- Throw away unnecessary items
- Organise your home and workplace
- Use labels
- Organise your ‘to do’ documents
- Organise your computer
- Make regular backups.
Some of these tips might take you some time at first. But on the long run, they will save you time and help you not miss any important action or deadline.
If you are just starting (or planning to start) your first business, you might find the blog article “20 Start-Up Tips for Beginners” also very useful.
