Laptop calendar planning tools, coffee, apple

On other pages, we looked at how to organise your home. Here we talk about how to organise life. I often suggest you make a map of your home and find what you want to declutter and organise first. If we talk about how to organise life, I suggest we look at life with a calendar. It allows us to do seasonal/yearly organising, to dive into planning mode and look at the ebbs and flows of your year. If you control your time, you control your life, and this means you can answer the question: ‘How do you organise life? My way!’

This is not an argument against being spontaneous, enjoying unexpected time off, being rigid, and so organised that you can’t cope when your plan isn’t followed. It is an argument about being intentional, following small actions, and getting to reach big goals. Then doing this year after year.

Here are the six ways to organise life

Get a big piece of paper and start to map and organise life things out
Think about the year ahead
Organise life on a practical level
Steering away from being busy
Over to you: How to organise life and divide your year?
Rest and deliberate leisure

Get a big blank piece of paper!

*The* ***first step*** to organise life is getting a year calendar or a blank piece of paper. This allows you to plot and organise your life. Irrespective of whether you are at home with kids, running an organisation, or are semi-retired.

A year calendar can show you specific times during the year when work is going at full speed and when there are stretches of quiet time. You can see the natural focus of things to organise life around during the year.

2. Think about the year ahead.

What time is best to work hard on a large-scale project, and when should you continue to practice your surfing? It depends on how demanding these tasks are sometimes different projects can complement each other but if they are both difficult things to do and learn you this won’t help you organise life it will instead make you feel overwhelmed. Have a good think when you want to organise life if this is the best time to take on another project.

What months is work at full throttle, and when do you relax and scale back?

Personally, I don’t like to say I am busy. I rather use words like focused, deliberate, and simply following my plan to organise life. You see, I have much more ownership of my time/ my life if I rephrase it. Another concept I like is a warm and cool state of mind. If you pre-plan, you tend to be in a cool state of mind, calm, collected, and logical.
Once you get into a hot state of mind, you are passionate, excited, energetic, and reactive, which is lovely and can work really well in many cases. However, you want to have a balance between the two. If you only plan to organise life, you become rigid. If you flow with the wind or other people's pet projects, you aren’t in control of your own life.

How to organise life: an example

I hope I am starting to convince you that looking at the year ahead is beneficial. But you might ask, ‘What does an organised life with a calendar look like?’
The below example has been my year for a while. Note that I work in line with the academic year; we have a very uneven distribution of workload throughout the year.

Lots of writing and thinking time. This is the time of year I get to do fun projects. Chill go for walks on the beach no time constraints and still get lots of thinking done.
University is in full swing so I have study commitments. Teaching commitments and my normal job is just more demanding. The benefit is that most people are actively engaged with work and not on leave this time of year.
A short winter break. I try to get away from the normal environment this time of year. My husband and the kids like going to the snow (yes Australia has a small but active snow sport culture). This gives us a change of scenery, pace and an ability to shake off the flurry of activity from the beginning of the year.
This is another period of the year when things are more demanding but it has a different flavour. People want to complete the work they started earlier, a lot of people are getting tired maybe because they don’t plan their breaks and year like you do. Most of us want a sense of completion or achievement at this stage.
We try to answer the question of: ‘What are my achievements for this year?’ It is worthwhile to reassess where you are, and what you have done and are achieving. Are you still following your true north or do you need to alter things a bit?
If you organise life and have planned your year ahead, you are miles ahead of the curve. This is because you most likely only have to tweak rather than scramble to achieve something “big” / tangible for the year.

3. How to Organise Life- on an even more practical level

In the above example and argument, I focus on the planning of the year's philosophical and “feeling” level. These are broad brush strokes. This is key in my opinion if you want to learn how to organise your life. However, we must also be practical and place these ideas on a year calendar.

At the time of writing, I have three different year calendars. Each of them has a different purpose. They tend to be paper-based and come together in my electronic day planner.

The School holiday year calendar - if you have kids

This calendar is one year at a glance and shows when the school holidays are. A school holiday calendar allows you to book something in August if it is still February. If separated, you can indicate when the children are with which parent. With a glance, you know your parenting demands at that time of year.
This calendar has very little detail. It is printed in A4 and has just a few colours, indicating the holidays and parenting demands. We often laminate it and have a copy on the fridge.
In the example, I start it in the middle of the year, from June to July. This shows Australia's summer school holidays and makes it quite easy to organise life. Normally, I would have drafted two years ahead (I know this is ninja-level organised).

Organise life with A work calendar

I work in Higher Education, and over the years, I have found life is more pleasant if I have a clear plan on how to organise life at work for the year. This work calendar shows what teaching, workshops, and courses run for my particular department in the year ahead. It allows me to communicate with other stakeholders when they have sessions, when we have more demands on our time and when it is quiet. This calendar runs from January to December, which is how our academic years unfold. Everyone can organise life with a work calendar and adjust if your “flow” or work year is different.
This work organise life calendar has more details, as I need to know what is running and when. It uses many colours to indicate a clear distinction of the organisational needs/rhythm. Anyone who has done University knows that weeks 1 and 2 feel different (very chill) from weeks 11 and 12 (code for stress and assignment central). Some of this calendar is a reference; for example, what week are we in? Other information shows what specific session is planned to run.
This calendar is made digitally but can be printed. I would like to get a copy on A3 so that no details are missed, and I use both paper-based and electronic calendars to organise life or steer the year in a preferred direction as it unfolds.

Organise life with your own year calendar

This is where I use a big wall calendar and a whiteboard marker to organise life. It answers how the kids and work schedules affect me and my ability to reach certain goals during the year. It also shows the demands of my personal goals. I am working through my PhD, and as part of this, I have a number of subjects/goals. I need to know when my assignments or deadlines are due, preferably weeks in advance. Also, I need to know when I am marking when I teach. For marking or doing large assignments, I can’t do and think about that much else, and the rest of my life needs to take a bit of a back seat.
This large-scale organise life calendar shows how to organise your life. It indicates when I have to work a bit harder when I can have a deliberate break, and how this works with my children’s schedule and the demands of full-time work. It also shows me that maybe I need a day or two off from my full-time job to push through some study or teaching obligations.

4. Steering away from being busy

You see, nowhere do I state I am busy. I am deliberate, and being a little more mature (older and wiser), I know what I can and can’t handle. You have to find your sweet spot in terms of having things to do, feeling overwhelmed, and being bored. Having both too much and too little on your plate can be very stressful. When you learn how to organise life and use a variety of planners, you can find that balance more often.

Clearly, for some people, I come across as slightly OCD, but investing time in planning to organise your life and your year will pay dividends in the months to come. It stops the guilt about not working on my PhD, my website, etc., because I have planned for this. I really am not busy; I am deliberate with what I do and when. Often, I enjoy the variety during the year. I get my teeth in a project before it is time to complete it, wrap it up, and do something very different.

The personal year calendar to organise life indicates when one phase ends and another begins. This tells you that I need to do something to celebrate after a milestone has been hit. All these small actions make life much more exciting, rewarding, and refreshing. What will you do?

5. Over to you: How to organise life and divide your year?

For you, the year is maybe more equally divided. I know lots of jobs work in quarters, and human nature likes even seasons. You might enjoy books like The 12-week Year, in which the authors argue you can make 3-month sprints on a handful of projects and then change gear to other projects all help you to organise life. It doesn’t work 100% for me, but the idea is great. The premise is you cannot do 10 projects simultaneously; you could, however, break them down over the year and only work on 2 or 3 for a set period of time to still achieve all 10 projects. All you need to do is learn how to organise life.

6. How to organise life - Rest and deliberate leisure

After doing this work, have a break and take some deliberate rest, this is part of learning how to organise life. Taking a break doesn’t mean you lie on the couch and do nothing for days or weeks on end. In the book “Time Off”, – the authors John Fitch and Max Frenzel argue like the philosopher Aristotle himself for Nobel Leisure. The best explanation is; “the free choice made by self-sufficient individuals to pursue what is most worthwhile” (Taub B, Harvard blog the Noble Leisure project)

You now know how to organise life

Through thinking about how to organise life in six ways, you have the skills to work on any project in a way that suits you. We looked at a range of ideas to use calendars and organise your life months in advance. Let’s pause and think about what this can do for you.

If you have never done this. What have you got to lose?

Why not try planning your year ahead? Working with calendars isn’t easy the first time, and it will take a little bit of time. Once you have a system that works for your life/work/family, you want to refine and improve it every year. The aim here is not perfection. You can change, pivot, and adjust your plan as much as you like it is your life and you get to decide how to organise life.

“The key outcome is not that you are perfectly organised all the time. It is that you look back at each year and feel happy about how you spent your time on the goals you wanted to achieve, the leisure you deserve, and with family and friends who love you.”

— Sabine Straver