priorities

Just like many other young women, I live a very busy life. I juggle multiple jobs, hobbies and relationships at once, and I do that purposely – not because I have to. I have many passions and love being social, but also want time on my own. In this way, I’m actually trying to live multiple lives. Luckily, I’m the type of person who believes you actually CAN have it all, IF you apply the following life-hacks.

What my life looks like (skip if not interested)

To give you an idea: I have a full-time job, in which I manage more projects than is possible in 40 hours, and in which I am also part of two committees that don’t overlap with my own work. I volunteer for an online philosophy magazine and run this blog & the Coco Instagram. I have more than a few friends that I see regularly, visit my parents often and I am planning a wedding with the love of my life who also gets a lot of my free-time (of course). On top of that, I meditate, read, journal, walk, stretch and listen to a podcast every day. In between the gaps, I do laundry, groceries, take care of our hamster (:)) and do other things in the house.

Yes, sometimes I do feel overwhelmed. But most of the time I am very happy and fulfilled. Here’s why and how this works for me.

Please note: I’m NOT saying you should be able to do as many things as I do. Mental and physical health is very important and also very personal! Please be aware of how much YOU can do while applying these tips.

Prioritise

The first thing is something I talk about a lot: setting priorities. This requires some reflection on what you really want and find important. You have to get clear on what you want in life, what and who you want to spend your valuable time on, and here we see another essential part: you have start seeing your time as valuable.

Once you see your time as something you can only spend once, and as something you want to spend on what you find useful, important and fulfilling, you can get clear on your priorities. Decide which parts of your life are essential for you, and which parts are only nice-to-haves. Do the same thing with the people in your life: who really adds to your happiness, and who are you holding on to for the wrong reasons?

If something or someone is not a priority, this doesn’t mean you have to delete them from your life completely (although, I do recommend this for the parts that really don’t add anything to your happiness). You can simply be more conscious on how much time you spend on them. It really all comes down to aligning the way you spend your time with your true values.

Delegate

I already wrote a full blog on how to delegate. Delegation comes in really handy for the parts of your life that you have just decided (in the previous paragraph) are not important to you, but also not easy to remove. Think of tasks you don’t like doing, even though you see how the result of doing them adds value to your life. These parts, you can delegate.

For example, I personally delegate cleaning and cooking for the most part. I do find a clean house and eating healthy food important, but I don’t like spending my own time on these things. I don’t enjoy cleaning and cooking, so I delegate it. Of course, I realise that you need the financial means to be able to delegate these, or have a really sweet partner you can ask to do it. 😉

If you don’t have these options, try spending as little time as possible on these things. You can learn optimising the way in which you do these ‘important, yet not worth your time’-things in the next paragraph.

Optimisation

The first way to optimise tasks you don’t like doing, is by creating order (in doing that specific task). This literally means you have a method of doing it, which you use every single time. Creating order saves you time because you know what to do in advance, and you know the method by which you are going to do it. So you don’t have to think of the ‘how’ every single time. Learn more on creating order in this blog.

Another way to optimise is doing things in bulk. Do you have many shops to visit, people to see, e-mails to answer or lunches to prepare? Set one timeframe to do all the things in the same category at once. Since it takes some time to travel, set appointments, get into your focus or prepare the task, it saves time doing many of the same things at one specific moment.

The last way to optimise is to simply learn from others. For example, there are many video’s on Youtube on how to do simple daily tasks more efficiently. Watching these once will save you time in the future. 🙂

Stay healthy

Managing many passions and people at once does not only take a lot of time, but also a lot of energy. I find that when I stay in good shape and eat healthy, I can do a lot more in a day and with more energy and focus.

Of course, I don’t have to tell you how to work out regularly and eat healthy. So instead, I will tell you the less obvious ways in which I stay healthy (on top of moving my body and eating healthy food):

I use Athletic Greens every morning to make sure I have all the vitamins I need. It also makes me feel like my brain is on fire all day, so that’s a big plus!
I have a very regular sleep-pattern to make sure I sleep enough hours. I go to bed around 10, and wake up around 6 or 7. In the weekend, the difference is usually only an hour later (because I fall asleep if I stay up longer anyway, and I want to bounce back easily on Monday).
I try to notice when my stress levels are high (adrenaline rush, heartbeat, negative emotions), and try to snap out of it. Meditating regularly and having my priorities straight, helps to do the breathwork or put things into perspective in these moments (see the next paragraph).
I limit my alcohol intake to 1 evening a week, and not a wild one ;). I limit my caffeine intake to max. 2 cups of coffee a day. And to compensate these habits, I drink at least 3 liters of herbal tea or water a day.
I eat intuitively. When I’m not hungry in the morning, I don’t eat breakfast. When I’m full, I stop eating. When I crave pizza, I eat pizza. This gives my body some rest on the right moments, and keeps my mind & body from putting energy into unnecessary cravings (or bloating).

Selfcare & meditation

I already mentioned that I meditate, read, walk, stretch and listen to a podcast everyday. While this sometimes feels like a burden, most of the time it helps me stay on track and juggle many things at once. Taking good care of your mind as well as your body enables you to do all the things you want, and to do them better and more focused.

I also take baths regularly, watch a lot of mindless shows while painting my nails (it’s called selfcare baby ;)) and take breaks from work/family/friends when, or actually right before, I really need to. Meditation is a way to slip out of reality when you don’t have a lot of time. There are even 5 minute meditations that can make you feel rejuvenated in between work or in a (parked!) car. Take that time when you feel like it.

If you do more, you can do more

As you may have noticed by now, I often like to end these lists with a hack you don’t actually have to do anything for. It’s more of an insight that you can use to your advantage. This time, I’m talking about the fact that when you do more, you actually get more done.

When you have full agenda, you somehow manage to do many things in a really short amount of time – simply because you don’t have more time. Think about writing a document: if you have all day, it will probably take you all day. You procrastinate, are very critical, think it over many times. But if you only have half an hour, you simply have no time to be lazy, critical or thoughtful. It just has to be done, so somehow you manage to do it in half an hour.

If you live life like this (almost) every day, you will see that you get more done, simply because you’re agenda is fuller. Tasks that you thought were a lot of work before, are now tasks you can squeeze in between the others. I’m not saying having a full agenda is always a good idea, but it is worth noticing (and praising!) how much you can actually do in a day.

Let me know if these hacks help you ‘have it all’, and what you do to manage many things at once!

xx Coco

I’m not going to say I’m a super organised person, but since the horror-year of 2020 I have become one more and more. I figured that in order (ha!) to reach my goals and dreams, some organising my thoughts and planning ahead had to come into play.

Creating your dream life is simply much easier when everything is in order, and to me – also more fun. Because where order is created, space to do what you want and dream of is appears. And I find it more fulfilling to be productive and creative in an organised space, than in a chaotic one. So let’s find out how you can create more order in your chaos (if you want 😉 ).

Decide on priorities

First of all, a big realisation is that we have a limited amount of time and space, pretty much everywhere in our lives. There are only 24 hours in a day, and there’s only so much space in your home, there’s a limited amount of thoughts your brain can handle, and there’s an ending to your money, energy and focus. So: let’s set some priorities. This is a way of creating order in itself, but it can also help us focus on where the order needs to be first, and what we want to create this new time and space for!

What is really important to you? What are your core values? What is are your non-negotiables? What do you want less of and what do you want MORE of? These are where your focus needs to be, so everything else: Good riddance to bad rubbish! It will leave more time and space for the things you love, and will leave you to take good care of them (instead of clogging your brain with the non-important stuff).

Plan more – or everything

Planning is an allergy of many people, but to many more it’s a great way to make sure that they actually do what they want and aim for. Planning more (or I as would plead: almost everything) also saves you from having to remember a lot of small things, which again only clogs your brain and uses up your energy. Having to come-up-as-you-go, remembering many things at once, not knowing where the day, week or year will take you all make for a big chaos in your life. And they are all things that keep you in the here & now, without ever having time or energy to think about where you want to go.

So no matter which medium you use – an old-school agenda, Notion, your e-calendar, a (bullet)journal or many planners, sheets and stickers – plan the details, save yourself some time (and probably some energy, money and frustration) and be the creative, productive, impulsive, venturous version of you when it comes to the important stuff.

Wake up early & have a routine

One way to start (and keep!) your day in order is to wake up at a set time everyday, and to have a routine that makes you feel clear, focused and calm. It helps to wake up early, because as the rest of the world is still sleeping, you can have a little time for what you find important – and not your boss, partner, social circle – these are the priorities we talked about in the first paragraph!

Also, if you can check off a big part of your (pre-planned!) to-do list in the morning, you will feel like you have more time to breathe in the rest of the day, and you will feel more calm and organised. I also often clean or tidy the house in the morning, so I can start the day with order (literally), and no energy will be wasted on chaos right away.

Make order a habit

A very easy and simple way to become more organised, basically takes care of itself. If you try the tricks above for a few weeks, you will feel that you are more used to order and you like having things organised. You will automatically clean up more, look ahead more, and focus more on the things you really find important. This will slowly but surely bring order into everything you do, which will have positive effects on every area of your life.

When my life is in order, my brain is too: so I’m a nicer person, make smarter decisions, can fit more into my day, eat more healthy, and have more fun. This is not because I force myself to be this neat and organised person, but because having a clean and calm environment, agenda and mind has become my habit.

Make time and space for more order

So, this leaves me to question: where can you make time and space for more order? Start with the recurring parts of your life, and ideally the ones that mean most to you. Clean up that space you have to look at multiple hours a day. Do more time-management at work. Maybe you can do things in bulk, or already plan some things that will make your life easier in the near-future.

You can really plan everything: to social events, to self-care moments, wish lists, relationships, you can even plan in time to do nothing if you need to. Some areas where I created time and space for myself, by simply creating order, are:

I wrote all the important dates and birthdays at the start of my journal, so I can transfer them to my months, weeks and days. I also plan ahead to think of and buy presents.

I have a set list of certain things that are not hard, but important for me to do every week (such as cleaning my phone and earpods, doing my nails and buying groceries). I made this a checklist so I can check it off every week when I’ve done them, not because I otherwise forget, but to save myself the time from thinking whether and when I want to do them, and how I spend my spare time. I have already done these things by making the list.

I wrote all the important dates and birthdays at the start of my journal, so I can transfer them to my months, weeks and days. I also plan ahead to think of and buy presents.

I have a set list of certain things that are not hard, but important for me to do every week (such as cleaning my phone and earpods, doing my nails and buying groceries). I made this a checklist so I can check it off every week when I’ve done them, not because I otherwise forget, but to save myself the time from thinking whether and when I want to do them, and how I spend my spare time. I have already done these things by making the list.

Of course, these tips are meant to make your life easier and more fun, not you set you up with a hundred more things to do. If you focus on creating order once a week, or even once a month, it can already help you out tons. Don’t think that by prioritising, planning or having a routine, you can’t be impulsive or go off-track.

Because even if you do, you have still created time and space in your head for more important things in the meantime! Planning does not only work if you stick to it, it also helps to empty your brain right away. It is up to you if you want to keep yourself to your own agreements (spoiler: I think life gets even more amazing if you do).

How you feel about planning? I’d love you hear your thoughts on these tips!