​“I have so much to do, that sometimes I don’t even know where to start!”  How many times of you heard yourself say those words?  I know that’s how I’ve been feeling the past week.  When we have unexpected things happen, our responsibilities don’t just stop.  Things keep piling up and eventually there is this big bunch of things to do and you almost feel paralyzed because you feel like no one thing is going to make a big enough dent to actually be considered a priority.  In order to know where to start, you have to know ALL that there is to do.  That’s why it’s important to have everything that you need to do in one place, and then you can more easily decide what needs to be done first.  

​I like digital tools, but before technology can help, I have to know what I’m going to put in that tool and how I am going to structure it.  I was feeling really out of control last week, so I did what always calms me down – got out a pencil and paper and start dumping my brain onto the page.  If you try this, don’t worry about it being pretty or cohesive or anyone else understanding what in the world you’re writing.  It’s so freeing to get what’s in your head onto paper, and then you can actually SEE all the things you need to do.   Unless you are super-human, it’s nearly impossible to figure out what to do and when if everything you have to do is floating around in your head all at once.

​If you’ve read the book The One Thing by Gary Keller, you know that he says there is always one thing that’s more important than everything else at that very moment in time.  Sometimes it’s so hard to figure out what that one thing is and it’s so much easier to just do busywork and make yourself feel like you’re being productive when in fact you’re doing nothing!  A good example of this is spending the entire day working out of your email inbox just responding to messages and taking care of brief little tasks, and then putting other, bigger projects aside for “later”.  If you do that type of triage all the time, “later” never comes, and those big tasks begin to create an overwhelming pile.

​I’m trying to unbury myself and am doing this in my personal life using Trello.  It’s a free app that I use on my laptop and on my iPhone where you can create different teams (which I’m using as areas of my life) and within those teams, you can create as many project boards as you want.  These are kind of like digital bulletin boards where you can create lists and tasks.  Trello gives you a visual representation of all of your to-dos and lets you drag and drop them where they go.  I took my handwritten notes and figured out there were several areas of my life:  Me, Family/Friends, Household, Volunteer, Side Hustles, and Work.  I use a different task management system at work called Nozbe.  Some people like to use the same system at home and at work, but I prefer to keep them separate, so I decided for these purposes to nix the work category in my Trello app. 

I started getting so excited about my new system that I spent a lot of time designing it, thinking, “should I have a separate areas for my blog, piano lessons and Clever Container sales or should they all be in one area called Side Hustles?”    I realized I was going down a dangerous path spending more time designing a system than using it!  I’m giving myself permission to start where I’m at and improve as I go.  That’s one of the things I like about Trello – it’s really easy to drag and drop tasks to different lists, put things in different order, and move boards to different teams.
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Once you get going and have all your responsibilities out of your head and in your chosen system, give yourself time to review all tasks and decide what is the “one thing” is that will move you forward, and what the next one is, and the next, etc.  Consider assigning due dates and reminders.  If you have projects that you repeat, create a template so you can copy and repeat what works best for you.  Don’t worry about your system being perfect – an imperfect system is better than no system at all!

Sources:
Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

 Life isn’t always fair or fun.  It can be full of fear, sadness, and unknowns.  We often mess up, are imperfect and make poor decisions.  Lately, I’ve felt like there are so many bad things all around me - bad things affecting strangers, my friends, and my family.  Sometimes, it’s easy to be so focused on the bad, that we begin to expect it.  I even verbalized this to a friend, “all this bad stuff is happening all around me, and it’s just a matter of time ‘til it happens to me.”  I sometimes almost feel guilty (rather than grateful) when bad things aren’t happening to me. 
 
I was right in the middle of this spiral of sadness and expectation of disaster when I got a text from my cousin, Darra.  A few months ago, I'd ask her to send me the next funny thing that happened to her and I'd include it in an installment of 'My Life In Laughter.'  These are posts that include audio recordings of me telling a funny story and laughing at myself.  I recorded a few gems including Cozy Shirt, Gold Saturn, Drive Through Judgment and A Cat Litter Incident.  I did this, not because I think I'm so hilarious, but because I truly believe in the power of laughter - especially when we can laugh at ourselves!  I knew I'd soon run out of funny material, and that Darra was a great storyteller who had funny stuff happen to her all the time (she was actually on Candid Camera once!)

Well, she came through at exactly the right time!  She made me laugh so hard listening to her tell this story of travelling alone to her grandmothers’ funeral.  Doesn’t sound very funny, does it?  But it just showed me that God gave us laughter even in the midst of sadness.  And to get a little deep and metaphorical – the title of her recording “Travelling Solo” – made me think how we really aren’t alone, and giving ourselves permission to laugh – especially when we share it with others – is good therapy to get through dark times.  When we are sad, scared, angry and our lives feel chaotic, maybe a little laughter shared with those around us can bring us a joy.  Take a listen to Darra’s ability to laugh, even in one of the saddest times.  Don’t feel bad laughing with her – it helps us all to heal!

Last winter, my kids had a magical three days when my husband’s and my flu-like symptoms overlapped.  It’s not that they wished us poor health, but they did enjoy our lack of enforcement of the no TV during the school week rule.  We were too tired to care, so we all got too much screen time for those few days.
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When are bodies are worn down, our regular routine usually goes out the window.  It’s so easy to get behind while we are sick – dishes pile up all over the house, hampers overflow, tissues cover end tables and the floor next to trashcans, and stacks of mail begin to topple.

The best way to keep it together when we don’t feel good is to create systems to follow while we are healthy so that we can afford to take a few days off when we're sick without things falling apart.  If you do these seven simple things on a regular basis, your house will be manageable, and when you get sick, you’ll have a little latitude to slack off.  

1. Hang up jackets and put bags in a designated area when you come inside.
2. Have an inbox for all of your paper, and process it regularly.
3. Immediately put away your clothes, shoes, and jewelry when you take them off.
4. Create a laundry system that your family sticks to.
5. Put dishes straight in the dishwasher. Run and empty the dishwasher regularly.
6. Clear surfaces when you leave an area.
7. Throw away or give away things you don’t use or need.

When you are under the weather, give yourself permission to take a few shortcuts to keep your house from becoming a disaster zone. 

• Keep a few cans of soup in your cabinet so that when you get sick, you can cook an easy meal.  It’s also a good idea to keep a couple of bottles of Gatorade or lemon-lime soda on hand in case of upset stomach.  As soon as you use any of these items add them to your shopping list.  You don’t want to be home sick with nothing easy to fix.
• Use paper plates, flatware, bowls, and napkins so you don’t have to worry about doing dishes.  If you do use regular dishes or cookware, put them straight in the dishwasher.  If you use a reusable cup, consider using a plastic straw that you replace periodically or use disposable water bottles.
• Put all incoming paper into a designated inbox (ideally the same system you normally use) and give yourself the ok to skip a week of processing it. (Check out this previous post about wrangling your paper!)

• Create a “sick bin” to corral all of your supplies in like tissues, chap stick, medicine, cough drops, a bottle of water, and your phone.  It’s easy to misplace things when you’re not feeling well, so keeping them all in the same bin that you can carry with you from the couch to the bedside table will help.  A bin with a handle is a nice touch! You can also use a small gift bag as a portable tissue trashcan.
• If you still have to go to work when you’re sick, bathe and wash your hair at night so you can sleep in as long as possible the next morning.  Tame the crazy hair the next morning with a spritz bottle and quick blast with the hair dryer.

​The best thing you can do when you’re sick is rest so that you can get back to yourself as soon as possible.  Don’t feel bad asking for help while you are sick or even when it’s time to play catch up.  You’ll feel like a rock star when you are healthy again and you realize that your house didn’t fall down around you!

Staying productive is hard.  If we only had to worry about our own priorities, it would be a little easier, but in real life, we have requests and expectations coming at us from all directions.  The biggest avenue for those outer expectations is our inboxes.  Most of us have at least two inboxes – a physical paper inbox and an email inbox.  I wrote about how to wrangle your paper in a previous post, and today, I want to start a series on how to manage your email inbox.

Even though email is dying a little because of other messaging apps, it is still prevalent especially in professional settings.  Most of us have at least two email addresses – a personal and a work address and receive many messages each day.  At my day job, I easily get over 100 emails every day, and at home, I may get 30 or so.  These add up very fast, and if you don’t know how to efficiently triage your messages, you can quickly get buried and miss the important messages because they nearly disappear amongst all the junk. ​

I use Microsoft Outlook at my day job and Gmail for personal and My Life In Order email.  These platforms are very different, but both common, so I will be using them as examples in this series.  Regardless of what email platform you use, the overarching principles of email organization are the same.  Email used to be a great, time-saving tool to replace handwritten or typed memos that had to be circulated through the office, but it’s turned into an invasive nuisance that the Washington Post reports takes the average white-collar worker a little over 4 hours each day to deal with.  This equates to 20.5 hours each week and more than 1,000 hours each year!  Even with the quantity of email we get, it doesn’t need to take up half of our work day, and by implementing some of these ideas, you should be able to dramatically improve your email efficiency!
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Process your email, don’t read and re-read it
You should do 1 of 4 things with new emails - delete, file, do, or move to a task management system (we will talk about the details of this in a later post.)  Don’t just read the your messages and leave them in your inbox to come back to later because you will end up either losing it, forgetting about it or you will re-read it over and over, which is just wasting your time!  If a message is obvious junk or something you are sure you will never need again, just delete it!  If it’s reference information that you may need later, file it.  If it’s actionable use the 2 minute rule that David Allen talks about in his book, Getting Things Done.  If the action can be completed in 2 minutes or less, just do it.  If it will take longer than 2 minutes or can’t be done until you have additional information, add the action to a task management system and then either file or delete the message.
 
Unsubscribe generously
Over time, we all sign up for various newsletters either on purpose or inadvertently.  Instead of continuing to delete them each time they are delivered, take an extra few seconds and unsubscribe from the ones you are no longer interested in.  Every email marketing platform (that’s legit) has a little button somewhere at the bottom of the message that you can click on to get off of their email list.  There are also some services that will help you get unenrolled from unwanted lists.  Of course those of us who have an email newsletter don’t want you to unsubscribe (it hurts our feelings) but I care more about your productivity than my email list, so do what you’ve got to do!  If you’re too scared to make that drastic of a decision to never receive a particular newsletter again, you can use the next tip instead.
 
Also be sure to report spam so it can be blocked for the future.  Most email platforms have a mechanism to report spam.  If you get rid of most of the junk, you'll spend less time sifting through all the things that don't matter for the few messages that do.

Rules, Rules, Rules
If you aren’t using rules in your email, pay attention!  You can set up a variety of rules in whichever email platform you use.  This allows you to never touch a message and direct it to go right to a particular folder, to be marked as read, or even go straight to the trash.  For those newsletters you were too scared to unsubscribe from, you could set up a rule to move them to a special folder.  Set a reminder on your calendar for a couple of months in the future to look at that folder.  If you haven't missed anything important, you may feel comfortable completely unsubscribing.

You can also create rules for message you send.  I have a rule so that if I put myself in the BCC line, it moves that message to a folder I have named “Waiting.”  This allows me to remember to follow up if I don’t receive an answer to my message.  You can also set up conditional formatting so messages from your boss are displayed in a different color.  In the next installment of this series, I’ll show you some examples!
 
Shortcuts
It’s ok to be a little lazy with your email!  There are many ways that you can cut corners.  In Outlook, my favorite is to set up quick steps to use just one click to complete an action like moving a message to a folder, creating an appointment with the contents of the message in the body, forward a message to a particular address, or create a new message to a particular address.  Learn how to drag and drop messages either to a folder or to your calendar.  Explore the menu that is displayed when you right click on a message.  Add commonly used folders to a favorites area to save a few seconds each time you want to access it.  Next time, I will provide some demos of how to set some of these shortcuts up.
 
Simplify your folders
I used to have an elaborate foldering system with folders for each project with sub folders and sub-sub folders, but what I realized a few years ago was I was spending so much time deciding where to folder things and nearly that same amount of time selecting the folder to look in when I wanted to find the message later that it just didn’t make sense.  Now, I have only one folder per year with a sub-folder for every month.  Anything I don’t delete goes in the folder for the month it was received.  All email platforms have search functions, and the two I use – Gmail and Outlook – have excellent search tools, so you can find any message without having to know what folder you put it in.  Some people like to keep EVERYTHING in their inbox and just search for what they need.  Now, that makes me a little anxious, so I prefer to folder when I’m done.  I look at my email inbox like my home mailbox.  It’s just for new stuff that comes in, and just like I take in my physical mail every day or so, I like to keep my email inbox emptied. 
 
 
 Next Time
In the second part of this series, I will have some demos to show you how to implement some of these tricks, but I need your help.  I could use several of you to email my demo email address with various subject lines. Email mylifeinorderdemo@gmail.com to help me create a good tutorial for you!

Sources
Photo by Krsto Jevtic on Unsplash
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“Analysis | How Many Hours of Your Life Have You Wasted on Work Email? Try Our Depressing Calculator.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 3 Oct. 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10/03/how-many-hours-of-your-life-have-you-wasted-on-work-email-try-our-depressing-calculator/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bd59896565f2.

Ansaldo, Michael. “3 Tools That Easily Unsubscribe You from Emails.” PCWorld, PCWorld, 22 Mar. 2017, www.pcworld.com/article/3181014/software/3-tools-for-easily-unsubscribing-to-emails.html.