How to Start Getting Organized if You are Overwhelmed

Feeling overwhelmed and buried under a mountain of responsibilities, clutter and thoughts can be paralyzing. In this blog post, I’ll explore a practical step-by-step approach to help you regain control of your life and start getting organized.

These techniques are designed to clear your mind, prioritize your tasks, and encourage you to take small, manageable steps towards your goals.

First Step: Braindump Session

Take a pen and a piece of paper. It’s time to tame the chaos that’s been swirling around in your head. Write down every task, thought, or concern, whether it’s a work-or family-related job, a household project, financial issues that needs to be addressed, dreams, goals, plans. Anything that comes up. This is your mental decluttering session, so there’s no need to be neat.
You can either create a mind map with thoughts branching off in various directions or simply make a list. The key is to get everything out of your mind and onto the page, relieving the mental burden.

step 1 of getting organized if overwhelmed: try a brain dump — A sample brain dump from one of my old bullet journals. As you can see it doesn’t have to be neat, just practical.

Second Step: Organize and Prioritize Your Thoughts

Take a moment to review your extensive list. For the next step you can use coloured markers or highlighters if you want, but it’s not necessary.
Use your favourite colour to circle all the tasks that need to get done as soon as possible. Everything that would make a huge difference if you could tick it off your list. These are the things we will look at first and getting them done will give you momentum to tackle more and more on your list.

Third Step: Create a Priority List

Write out your most important tasks on a new piece of paper. Now, take a closer look at each one.
Are there quick, two-minute tasks on your list? If so, take a moment to complete them immediately. These small wins build your confidence and momentum.
Are they bigger tasks that feel overwhelming to you? Break them down into smaller steps. Break them down as much as you need to until you feel like you can get started with one.

step 4 of getting organized if overwhelmed: tiny baby steps like a to do list in a calendar — I often create a checklist in my calendar, listing things like self care or baby steps of bigger projects

Fourth Step: Take Baby Steps

Never underestimate the power of tiny tiny mini steps. As long as you feel any resistance to getting started on your task, ask yourself: Is there anything else I could do to make it easier, shorter, simpler? For example, could I set a 2 minute timer and work on my task? Could I create one first little step towards my goal?
Say, your living space is a complete mess with clothes, toys, books, socks thrown everywhere, and you know it would make such a difference to have this area nice and clear but you want to crawl into a hole when you even look at it. What could be one tiny first step that you could do here to start getting organized?
Here are some ideas: Set a timer for 5 minutes and begin in one corner of the room. See how much you can get done in this time frame and if it gives you momentum to keep going. Or set yourself a simple goal like picking up all the clothes and nothing else. That’s something that works well with children too. If you give them a clear easy task like “find all the books and bring them to the shelf” it’s much better than a general task like”clean up your room”. Finding and gathering all the items of one category is a bit like a treasure hunt and much more fun.

If it helps you to start getting organized you could have a braindump session at the beginning of every month.

Then you use what came up during the brain dump to create a list of goals for the month ahead.

Last summer I wrote two blog posts (May and June) listing my goals for the following month which helped me a lot to stay on track with different things I wanted to focus on.

Are you going to give it a go?