When we talk about our goals in life, the one thing that most us will list is 'being happy'. Such a simple word that is yet so hard to achieve. And by naming that goal the question that ultimately comes up is how we can reach it. To me, happiness also means coherence or in other words, having a balanced life. A balanced life looks different for everyone although everyone would agree that they need a counterpart of working. Which can be very challenging as our lives are very much shaped by what we do for a living and sometimes we sit there wishing the day had 27 hours instead of 24. Luckily, there are some ways we can save time & stress and it is easier than you might think. Over the last few months, I became really passionate about the idea of simplifying your life and I discovered a few tricks to achieve that. So today I'm sharing those with you. x
1. Prioritising
Structuring your day and setting priorities really helps to eliminate stress and feeling overwhelmed. I've found this tip on http://cupcakesandcashmere.com and it helped immensely: when writing the to-do-list for the next day mark 2 or 3 things that really have to be done by the end of the day and make sure to tick these off first. The other things on your list should be those that are less urgent and that can be postponed if you don't find the time. If you follow this tip your to-do-lists will look a lot less overwhelming, you won't feel frustrated when not getting everything done but really proud if you manage to tick off another box after getting your top 3 done. To-do-lists of this kind also allow you to be more flexible and you won't panic if something unexpected comes up during the day.
2. Structure your mornings
Another thing that helps me a lot a good start into the day. When I was younger I spent every morning hitting the snooze button at least 2 times (I'm not even going to pretend that this has changed) and then I would get done as fast as possible and try to eat breakfast within 5 minutes. Not exactly ideal. Over time I managed to improve my morning routine, I now get up earlier and do a workout before eating - it's a great way to start the day and you won't have to worry about working out after work. Another thing I can recommend is structuring your wardrobe, putting clothes in the back you hardly wear and sorting the rest of your clothes by categories. Something else that really helps me is putting together 2 go-to-outfits that I'll wear when I can't make up my mind in the morning.
3. Meal planning & preparation
I'm sure you've all heard about this before but planning and preparing your meals can save you plenty of time. And it saves you money when going grocery shopping as well. When I got a busy week ahead I'll make a big pot of pasta on Monday so that I can use the leftovers for the next day (or for the rest of the week, I wouldn't even mind having pasta for 7 days straight). Other great things to prepare are rice as it goes great with so many meals and dips such as hummus if you're craving a snack. If you got some pasta and rice left all you need to add is some veggies or a nice sauce and you got your meal ready in 10 minutes.
4. Boxes
Something we can definitely save time on is cleaning - and this tip is really simple and chic as well. I recently sorted my makeup and hair products into boxes - before that I had them standing on my makeup table and although it looked interesting it took really long to clean. If you pack many things into boxes it will make the cleaning process a lot easier. I also started to use less decoration for the same purpose and I also love the minimalistic look for my room.
5. Unsubscribing from newsletters
How many emails are you getting a day? How many of them do you actually read? It got to a point where I got more than 30 emails a day, all being newsletter or other forms of adverts. That made it pretty difficult to keep track of my email folder and to actually find the ones I really needed to read. Recently I took an hour unsubscribing from the majority of these newsletters, it mostly just needed one click. So if you get way too many emails, I can definitely recommend doing that - by decluttering your email folder, you're also decluttering your life.
