by Malti Bhojwani

 When you know what is most important to you, you can organise your time, space and life.

1. Sit down and list your short and long-term goals. Even if you are the sort who hates to do this or finds it wussy, please trust me. If you don’t want to call them goals, then they can be three things that you want to have in a year and three things you want to have at the end of your life (ie: you would like written or said about you in your epitaph). Organisation is all about clarity.c When you know why you want it, it will take the distractions away.

2. Prioritise action steps that need to be taken each week in order to bring you closer to the above goals. Put them in order of what you really want to get done and what it would be nice to get done. Make this to-do list the night before. This will help you sleep better. 

3. List the people in your family and life who you absolutely love and want to ensure that you are actively nurturing these relationships. Make sure you put them into your week to call, see or connect with as much as you can. Seeing them adds to your positive energy and actually fuels you up. List the people who you contribute to and make seeing them a part of your week as well. Lastly, list the ones that networking with will help in some way to enhance your work/career/brand. Ensure you allocate time to each of these categories every week.

4. Clean up your space. Spend one day organising your desk, workspace, dresser, cupboards, drawers and your phone and computer. Delete, discard, recycle what is no longer useful. When you know where EVERYTHING is, it will free up so much time. (Imagine typing if the keyboards were not organised the way they now are?) Researchers at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute say, “When your environment is cluttered, the chaos restricts your ability to focus. The clutter also limits your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as well as you do in an uncluttered, organised, and serene environment.”

5. Delegate! The only way to have balance in your life is to manage your time. If you give up the need for perfection in everything and you trust and allow other people to do a few things for you, you will free up a lot of time and hence be able to consciously create balance in your life. Good enough is better than nothing and perfectionism can be an obstacle. Allow others to do things for you by trusting that they will do them well if YOU take the time to communicate CLEARLY. Learn to make powerful REQUESTS and practice saying “no” often to what you don’t want to do.

6. Ensure that you commit enough time each day to nurture your soul by plugging in or centering. This is the time you sit in silence with yourself and you are still. You can watch some of my videos on YouTube to help you do this better if you don’t already have your own practices. This will help you to find your inner balance. Having what you desire is not just about doing and taking action, it is more about who and how you are “being”. The model I use is “see-be-do-have” – you have to first see where you are and what you want clearly. Clarity! Only then can you “be” the person you need to be in order to plan and do the actions that is required to have what you so want.

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Read this article in Times of India

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.