How to manage many things at once

Deep ✨, Lifestyle 🏃🏼‍♀️

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

When you hate, delegate

Geen categorie

Last week I realised that I was actually juggling many things at once. Besides my fulltime job, I have a number of things I want to do daily, such as meditating, reading and walking. I also just started this website, volunteer at a philosophical magazine, have my own household and a fun social life. I started wondering which parts of my life I fully ‘carry’ myself, and for which parts I actually have to thank other people. Because I realised, the reason I can do all these things is because I’m pretty good at delegating.

Why you should delegate

Delegating is not only a good idea if you want to do many things in a limited amount of time (like me), but also if there are certain things you feel like you should do, but you simply hate doing (also like me). These things could put you in a negative mood, either because you’re not good at them or you simply don’t want to spend your time on them.

If you can compromise with other people, or if you can pay someone who is good at this task to do it (and if you have the financial means of course), I believe you should delegate it. Is makes life so much easier, and definitely more fun!

How to delegate at home

For my house stuff, I delegated the part I hate the most on the first day I started working my full time job. The minute I came home from that first day, I realised that I was not going to be happy working on weekdays, and then doing all the cleaning after work or on weekends. I realised I was really glad to be able to pay someone to do it for me, and it is still one of my best decisions ever.

Even if you don’t hate cleaning or see it as a small task that just needs to be done, I would seriously consider delegating it if you have the money for it. To me, not having to worry about the cleanliness of my house does not just save a lot of time in my weekends, but also a lot of space in my head. It is simply ‘not my problem’ anymore.

You can also make rules with the people you live with. For example, my fiancé and I agreed that I always do the groceries, because otherwise he will come home with too much unhealthy stuff. In return, he always takes out the paper and glass (trash), because I dislike carrying heavy stuff down the street.

We don’t mind doing our own tasks, and this way we don’t have to feel responsible for the whole household, just a part of it. I don’t know if you could call this delegating, but it definitely makes for more time in your day – especially now that you don’t have to negotiate on who does what all the time.

How to delegate at work

At work, I delegate a big amount of tasks too. I am a project manager, so in that role delegating is something that kind of comes naturally. The reason I delegate at work, however, is not always because I don’t feel like doing it myself (although sometimes – to be completely honest – that also happens) but because someone else is better at this specific task, or could do it in a shorter amount of time. Knowing your own strengths and qualities, and acknowledging those of your colleagues, is a great tool to be able to assign tasks among you.

This way, it makes sense that I do not do certain tasks (even in my own projects), because I’m simply not the one who’s best at it. Another reason to delegate is a limited amount of time. If you really don’t have the time to do a task, even if you are the right person for the job, it makes perfect sense to ask one of your colleagues to do (at least a part of) it. Don’t feel guilty about these situations, there’s only so many hours in a day.

As someone who likes to be in control, delegating is not something I have always done. When I was younger, I always wanted to do things ‘my way’ and didn’t want other peoples flaws and opinions mixed up in my work. Nowadays, I still feel like that sometimes. But I decide to only keep it close and strictly to myself when I think it’s really, really important (like this website).

When it’s something less important to me, like cleaning the house or simple tasks at work, delegating has become the only way for me to do everything I want. And in this sense, I am very grateful to have the means and people around me that make all my dreams possible.

Thank you so much for reading and let me know if you delegate in the comments!

xx Coco

Tips for waking up early (and why you should)

Geen categorie, Lifestyle 🏃🏼‍♀️

To be completely transparent with you; I have never been an early bird. In fact, I always described myself as ‘an evening-person’. I never liked the mornings but loved the evenings. I was at my (creative) best after 10 pm, and never woke up before 8 am unless I really, really had to. My evenings were a last-minute party to celebrate that ‘it isn’t tomorrow yet’. My mornings were a struggle because I ‘had to wake up just to go and work all day’. And I always accepted that this was just my way of living. Until I tried something else.

Why I wanted a morning routine

The transformation of my mornings started with my general hate of working. Don’t get me wrong, I probably have the best job ever, but since I was very young I have felt it as an absolute unfair mistake that society somehow decided that everyone has to work all day for five days a week. It just doesn’t make sense to me. So, every job I’ve had felt like I had to do it, I simply didn’t have a choice, and that makes even the most fun thing to do always feel just like any other job. And since I didn’t want to quit my job (because there is no better job for me out there), I decided to change the way to look at it, from the moment I get out of bed.

I decided to wake up, do something for myself first, and then later on start my work just like ‘one of the many things I do in a day’. I decided to see work as a part of my day, not my whole purpose for waking up every morning. I had to make myself believe that there was something else – something more fun and more important I had to do first, before getting to work. And so, I invented myself a little morning routine.

First, I decided I wanted to stretch and move my body a little bit, just to feel more fit and healthy in the morning. A few days later, I decided to add a meditation to it for a good mood, and a little reading for some intellectual stimuli. Later, I found that I also wanted to clean my house for a few minutes, just so I would start my day more clear and organised.

then, I decided to add a podcast to my cleaning (because it’s more fun and hits two birds with one stone), and I found out that I really enjoy a short walk before I sit down behind my desk. All in all – my morning activities were stacking up, but my mornings did become a lot more fun than waking up cranky, rushing to get ready, and dreading to start working. And most importantly: they became an investment in myself, not my job, my relationship or my social life, but in me.

The pro’s

As bonus, I found out that having some time to spend on myself in the mornings also made the rest of my day a lot easier, more fun and more productive. The only downside is probably that I have to go to bed quite early to be able to get up at 6 am the next morning.

But honestly, I even like that part of it now: my evenings became a lot more relaxed since I am more productive during the day. Today, I would say that having a nice morning route is the biggest reason I stay on track in reaching my goals, and manifesting the dream life I want.

So, how do I (as an ‘evening-person’) manage to wake up every day at 6 am?

Here are my tips:

Lay out your clothes for the next day. This makes getting out of bed and getting ready less of a hurdle. It lowers that bar of unpleasant things you have to do once you get up!
Make sure you love the things you do in the morning. If you don’t like reading or meditation, please don’t do it! Do something that suits you and gets you in a good mood. It is totally fine if this includes activities that aren’t as productive or goal-oriented.
At first, set your alarm clock a little earlier each day. You can take some time getting used to these early mornings. Then, set your alarm at the same time every day, and go to bed around the same time every evening.
Enjoy the quiet moments where you feel like the world is still asleep, cannot bother you yet, and the head start you get by waking up early. Also take some time to enjoy the sunrise – a little present just for you!
Play some music, light a candle, make yourself a fancy cup of tea or coffee. Set the right mood to start your day and enjoy the vibe. This can also make you more excited to get out of bed.
Don’t give up if it takes time getting used to, or if you fall off track. You are totally allowed to sleep in now and then, just pick right back up when you’re ready.

Good luck transforming your morning!

xx Coco