Four Hacks to Organize Your Life (and Write More)

One of my superpowers is being organized. As a kid, that was pretty much the most boring descriptor ever. I wanted to be fun! Friendly! Spontaneous! But nope—I was organized. Now I still want to be fun and friendly (I gave up on spontaneous), but I openly love being organized because it helps me get so much done. So here are my four hacks to organize your life (and write more!).

Weekly/Daily Planning

I believe in planning, both weekly and nightly. On Sunday, I list tasks in three columns: tasks I need to do this week, joint tasks my husband and I need to do this week, and tasks I want to do in the future. Then each night, I write down the tasks I think I can get done the next day at roughly the times I hope to do them. (Ideally, I also sit down with my husband at some point and plan when we’ll tackle our joint tasks, but mostly we do this on the fly.) The challenge with both weekly and nightly planning is being realistic. My planning is most effective when I’m realistic—not idealistic—about what I can accomplish in a day or week. Then if I do get everything done, I can hit up the “future tasks” list. This is good hack to organize my life because it tackles the most important items first.

Meal Planning

I hate everything about cooking, but mostly how long it takes. When I started making real meals every night, suddenly meal planning added to the cooking overhead. How was I supposed to find time to write? But being an organization fiend, I fought back by creating a master list of every meal we regularly make, divided by category: Rice, pasta, meat-and-side, casserole/salad/stirfry, soup/chili, and quick, easy meals. Each category has our go-to meals, plus a few trial recipes that I keep meaning to try and probably never will. This makes it easy to see my options and put together a weekly plan that includes big meals that will give us leftovers, single-serving-but-normal-labor meals, and quick, easy meals.

Yearly Planning

My strategy with yearly goals is to identify categories for improvement, choose one—max, two—concrete goals for each, and outline steps to reach those goals. For me, typical categories include physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, and occupational, but if I can’t think of a goal for one of them, I don’t stress it. I also don’t stress whether I achieve all my goals. They’re more like signposts for where I want to go, and I use some to push myself throughout the year but others as an occasional reference point. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but it works for me! If you want to look at organizing your life goals from a different angle, my Hot Mess Writers Club friend Heidi shared the uplifting idea to make a pipedream list, where you list goals that are unlikely to happen but would be a dream come true if they did. You can read more about pipedream lists in Heidi’s newsletter, Let’s Grow.

Bucket Lists

Every winter, I make a summer bucket list where I write down all the fun things I’d like to do that summer. I take a “sky’s the limit” attitude here—I never know what will come up, but if I organize my life with opportunities in mind, when summer rolls around and I have an evening or weekend with no plans, I look at my list and find myself an adventure.

Bonus: How to Use This Hack to Write More

In preparing to write my last few novels, organization was huge. I created character profiles, timelines, plot outlines, maps, and a world-building bible that included answers to hundreds of questions about economics, politics, technology, and more. It was an immense amount of work—but so helpful when I sat down to write. Everything I knew about the characters and the world informed the story and helped it flow onto the page, allowing me to complete the novels in 10-12 weeks each.

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Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash