Reduce Your Stress by Organizing

If I'm feeling stressed, it's usually due to a couple of reasons: I feel disorganized or my surroundings are disorganized.

It's amazingly freeing to take just a few minutes to get your mind, schedule, and priorities organized. List everything that is flying through your mind - your to do list, places you need to go, people you need to contact, etc. Just putting it on paper relieves the stress of having to remember everything.

Next, prioritize and assign a day to each task. Once you parcel everything out, it won't seem so overwhelming. If it is, maybe you need to evaluate if everything on your list is really that important to you or whether you have overcommitted yourself. Remove those things that are least important and urgent. Delegate or get some help on other items. Practice saying, "NO!"

If you have tasks you want to do each day, make a daily routine you'd like to follow in order to accomplish those high-priority items.

If your surroundings are disorganized and cluttery, it's hard to have a peaceful mind. Take a few minutes and clean off a surface - a coffee table, a counter, a desk. If your clutter is sizable, attack it in short bursts if you can't face a long siege. You can do anything for 15 minutes! I usually start in a corner of a room and work around it.

When your mind is clear of clutter and your surroundings are neat and orderly, you have given yourself the gift of reducing some of the stress in your life. And you are free to be creative and productive!

How do you reduce the clutter in your life?