Over the last couple of years, the term “self-care” has become commonplace and to be honest, sometimes it feels like nothing more than a buzz word.  I’m here to tell you that self-care is so much more than eating healthy foods and smoothies and spa days.  It’s really a holistic practice that is meant to help you sustain, not just something you do in a pinch to get through a moment.  It’s about changing your habits and attitudes for the long term.  When you focus on making self-care a habit or a lifestyle, it begins to function like a muscle.  The more you use it, the stronger it becomes and the more natural it becomes.

In today’s day and age, people are busier than ever.  Between school, work, taking care of families, and being involved in the community, it can be very difficult to find time to take care of yourself, much less working towards making self-care a lifestyle.  I wanted to take a closer look at how organization or lack thereof can affect self-care because the two really do go hand in hand.  As soon as we get overwhelmed with our schedules or booked up doing things for other people, we forget to pencil ourselves in.  When you don’t take the time to recharge, it’s easy to feel sad and unmotivated.  So to prevent this from happening, let’s take a closer look at self-care in relation to organization, why it matters, and how they can live together in harmony.

Like I said before, self-care and organization really do go hand in hand.  When you’re organized, you’re less likely to put yourself on the back burner and more likely to schedule time for yourself regularly.  Having time for self-care is step one!  If you don’t think you have time for it, you won’t do it.  So being organized matters because organization allows you to find or create a trigger, find the right time in your schedule, and train the cycle.  For example, I have an Apple Watch and on the watch there’s this Breathe app.  I have it set to push a notification to me twice a day in hopes that I’ll actually do it at least once.  I set it for one minute and that’s how I manage to have at least one minute of mindfulness each day.  I made my watch’s push notifications the trigger, based on the times I found in my schedule, and I trained the cycle.  Now I’m trained to actually pay attention to those notifications and if I ignored both during the day, I do my one minute of deep breathing right before bed.  Now that you understand the idea I’m going for, here are some tips for making self-care and organization work for you and not against you.

Prioritize

In addition to alerts on my watch and phone, I use my planner for everything.  I’m no novice when it comes to technology but there’s something about writing things down and seeing them on paper that helps me focus and remember to do them, and crossing something off of a list after it’s done makes me feel more accomplished.  So I use my planner to tasks down and to prioritize.  If you get the most important things done first, you’ll be better equipped to parse out your time and include self-care.

Stick To It

This is important!  What good is writing things down and prioritizing if you’re not going to do what you said you were going to do?  Build that discipline and stick to your list of priorities.  It’ll cost you much less to be disciplined now than it will cost you further down the line when you’re stuck with fifty million things to do and no time to do them.

The 3x Rule

I’m think I started doing this in college when I realized that I had a LOT on my plate and that I had to step up my organization game if I wanted to get everything done to the level of my liking.  I write major things down three different times in my planner.  Little things like groceries and errands I can write down once and accomplish.  But bigger things that take more time (like writing a blog post), I write down on three different days within any given week in my planner in hopes of doing it.  Why is this useful?  It’s a built-in barrier against life.  Things will pop up in your week that you never saw coming!  Running an errand for a family member, having to stay at work later than you anticipated, a 3-hour phone call from a friend in need of your kind words and encouragement.  Things will happen, I guarantee you.  So if I write something down to be done on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I should be able to get it done by Friday, even with random things happening during the week that eat up my time.  If I get it done on Monday, great!  I’ll cross the item off the list for Wednesday and Friday.  But if not, I have some built in support.

Use People

This is the only time I will condone this lol.  When you make people around you aware of what you’re trying to do, it’s so much easier to do because they can help to hold you accountable.  Does this mean that people still won’t ask you to do things for them and try to stretch you nine ways to Sunday?  Nope.  Some people will still try to push and pull you as much as you let them.  But the people in your life who truly care about you and want the best for you will hold you accountable.  But you have to do your part and make them aware!

That’s it!  If you enjoyed this post, chances are some of your friends probably will too.  So share this post with your friends, comment below, and as always, thanks for journeying with me.