How managing your time, & your to do list, can give you the headspace you need to achieve your goals

Lots of people start off the year thinking about goals and what they want to achieve as the next 12-months stretch out ahead of us. Many new year goals are focussed on wellbeing - from exercising more and regularly cooking healthy homemade meals, to stressing less - so many of us want to ‘improve’ our lives. Very often, ‘simply’ being more organised and improving your time management can underpin how successful our wider goals are. Afterall, how often have you said that you haven’t got time to go to the gym, or you’ve run out of time to cook tonight, so a takeaway will have to do.

There are lots of business tools out there to help with time management, for example Asana and Trello (both of which I use for work), but there is no reason why these can't be used for your personal life too. Both are great digital ways of managing your to do list/s so are definitely worth thinking about if you're a 'list person' like me!

They can be used on your PC or Mac as well as via an App on your phone so you never have the excuse of 'leaving your to do list at home'! There are also things like the Eisenhower Matrix - this is a grid that helps you work out what is important and what is urgent, plus what you can forget about and delegate to someone else (your other half, or the children??!) - see the image below.

It's quite a good way of sorting through your to do list if it feels overwhelming (I used it at the beginning of the week and it hugely helped to keep things in perspective and reducing the overwhelm).

Whilst I am an advocate of being organised, and despite these amazing tools, try not to become a slave to your to do list. We can all have lists as long as our arms (and multiple ones at that), but more often than not these lists can create a huge distraction to living our lives in a calm and fun way. We can become obsessed with wanting to cross things off the list so feel constantly busy. There's nothing wrong with writing everything down - that way you don't need to try and remember it all - but pick the urgent things that need to be done right now, and schedule or delete the rest.

Life is for living, not for chasing your tail (or your to do list!).

The more organised you are, the calmer and more in control you can feel. Being on top of your 'life laundry' can go some way towards giving you the headspace to think about what you really want to do with your life. Are there new skills you'd like to learn, do you want to spend more quality time with your family, are there trips abroad you'd like to plan? I believe it's all about creating new habits that will ultimately give you headspace.

If your house and your life is in order (and therefore your to do list shorter!), you can enjoy that feeling of calm and togetherness and really focus on what you want.