How to Simplify your Life

Feeling overwhelmed can be so debilitating. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, small tasks collate into looming to-do lists and a lot of important things seem to fall off the wagon - like self care, looking after your mental health and taking a rest day. I’m a massive advocate for simplifying wherever possible - in my home, my calendars, my jobs, and even my belongings. Check out the full blog post below for some easy-to-implement tips to help simplify your life!

1. Streamline and automate:
​Believe it or not, there are a lot of things we do exactly the same every week. May that be managing your finances, cooking dinner every night, making the kids lunches, attending appointments and managing our belongings.


If you haven’t already, create routines where these repetitive tasks have their own place and time. For example, if you set aside time in your morning to go through your emails and prioritise the work then you won’t feel so overwhelmed by the constant notifications on your phone. You know you have set aside a time to tend to your emails, so they don’t need your immediate stress and attention right now.


Same goes for managing your finances. Set aside a time each Sunday night to review your bills. In the mean time during the week, have a designated place for all your bills and receipts so it’s all ready for Sunday.


Here are some more suggestions:

• Streamline meal times by meal planning and pre-packing lunches for the week.
• Make follow up appointments at the time of your latest appointment. Eg. doctor, dentist, nail salon, hairdresser etc. This way you’re less likely to let regular health checkups slip because the next appointment is already scheduled!
• Look into minimising unnecessary belongings. When you have less things, you have less to wash, tidy, maintain and pick up!

2. Ask yourself: Is there a way I could get the desired result here with fewer action steps or fewer elements or in less time?

This is all about taking the white noise, extra energy and effort out of your actions.


Here are some ideas:

• batching tasks/time blocking: group similar tasks together so you don’t waste time transitioning (eg. today I’m doing all my washing and cleaning from 7am - 7:45am)
• grocery delivery, use your local click & collect service or check out a food bag delivery service!
• minimising kids toys, teach your kids that they must give of their belongings to receive new ones. And most importantly, teaching them to value and care for everything they have!
• getting rid of bad friendships, ain’t nobody got time for fake friends.
• cutting back on kids activities, allowing them to focus on their main interests rather than pursuing everything!
• look into a capsule wardrobe, this means focusing on purchasing the key essentials which are super versatile and high quality!
• minimal ingredient meals, simply food can be beautiful and equally delicious!
• minimising gift exchanges, ask for experiences not possessions!
• simplify your accessories, have a signature handbag or backpack instead!
• minimising shoes, focus on the basics that are comfortable and practical.
• getting rid of extra cars
• working from home (if possible)
• delegating chores around the family or perhaps consider hiring help!
• donating rather than selling (or sell on marketplace!)

There are so many other ways you can simplify areas of your life. Simplify question anything you’re currently struggling with and try to break the solutions down into easy steps to help rectify the issue!


3. Streamline your to-do list

No matter how much of a bad ass girl boss you are, you’re not always going to get everything done. And that’s not because you’re not doing it right.


I’m addicted to my to-do list. But I find it ends up being a long list which is more like a brain dump than a structured and prioritised collation of tasks! Firstly, try writing a weekly to do list rather than a daily one. This means that no matter what life throws at you on each given day, you’ve taken the pressure and stress off yourself and you no longer have the pressure of an accumulating to-do list.


What you leave off your to-do list is just as important what you leave on. Your time and energy are precious, so don’t make your to-do list a brain dump of anything and everything you should, could or can get done.


If you have do, put rest and self-care on your to-do list!


Also, never write a to-do list more than half a page long. And with each item ask yourself

• does this need to be done?
• does this need to be done by me?
• does this need to be done right now?

 
​4. Try an urgency/importance grid:

This is another way of organising your list of to-do tasks in a way which effectively prioritises them!

Source: https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-master-your-priorities-with-the-urgent-important-matrix-a7904de55266

Here are some examples of each section:
1. Urgent/important - fire in your kitchen, crying baby, friend in need. You have to deal with them, they’re important and you care about them.

2. Urgent/not-important - emails, calls, social media notifications. You think you have to deal with them right now but in most cases you don’t and in most cases they don’t matter in the grand scheme of your life.

3. Non-urgent/important things are your health, your relationships, you dreams. We often ignore these until it’s too late. But they’re the most important parts of our lives.
​
4. Non-urgent/non-important - busy work and other things that waste our time.


You may notice that you tend to spend the majority of your time on the urgent/not-important tasks because they present themselves as fires and we fancy ourselves firefighters. They trigger our flight or fight response and we jump into action to solve the problem before taking a moment to even ask ourselves if this problem is ours to solve, if it’s even worth solving or if it’s even a problem to begin with. Social media notifications are a great example of this. They’re urgent because they’re flashing at us, but in the grand scheme of our lives they’re not important. Just like your email notifications!


Make sure to make room for the non-urgent but important things on your list too!


5. Ask and you shall receive.

Open the lines of communication between you and your partner. Often when we feel like they aren’t doing their bit it’s because we’ve failed to communicate what we need. Communicating what we need in order to feel support is the key. No one can give us what we want unless we tell them what it is. While there’s this idea out there that love means someone can magically read your mind and meet all of your needs without you having to speak up, it’s completely bogus and if you’re waiting for that you’ll be waiting forever.


Lack of communication is the cause of so much unnecessary drama and angst so get chatting! Schedule a meeting with your partner if that seems to be more effective, or share your calendar’s with each other to help fit in important tasks! This can include anything from managing the kids, finances, organising date nights, managing household chores, and even girls/guys nights with your friends!


There you have it - my 5 simple tips to simplifying your life! What area of your life do you recognise needs simplifying? Let us know how you’re going to accomplish it in the comment section below!


From our home to yours,