11 steps to get your life together

This is a simple guide on how to get your life together for a more organized and productive life!

So we've been trying to write this post about how to get your life together and how to live a more meaningful and exciting life, but then… a little disgusting voice popped into our head and told us:

“Who TF do you think you are to share these tips? Beyonce? Your life’s nowhere near together.”

That voice made us a little bit insecure, we cried for a few hours, but then we said: “Shut up”. If it was a deeper and scarier voice we might have listened, but today, we're doing this.

You know why? By now, we're pretty sure nobody has their life together. But we can all learn from each other. We mean, solid couples seem happy together one day the next day they divorce. You can’t have a life together, you have to go with it. And adapt and be flexible, fall and get back on track while trying to enjoy as much of it as you can.

These here are things that have helped us create a life we're truly happy with right now. We're not solid, we have our ups and downs and we don’t know if these things would be still working for us in 3 years or even 3 months from now. But until this day, these tips have been effective with getting our life back on track and we hope at least some of them help you too.

1. Make A Plan

A reliable way to start getting your life together is to create a plan that allows flexibility. To do that, you first need to evaluate what is working and what is not working right now. What do you want to do more of? What do you not want to do so often? New experiences?

A goal planner like this one can be a huge help when it comes to setting goals, making a detailed plan and gaining clarity about what you want to achieve during the next few months. (if you do decide to get it, use the code NTB20 to get the planner for 20% off).

If you don’t have a goal planner, that’s not a problem. You can use a sheet of paper. We personally, like to set 3-5 goals for the year (or 6 months) and then goals for the next 3 months, for the month and the week. It’s important to break your goals down into action steps, so you can actually see what it would take. This way you’re also more likely to start doing something about these goals and not keep them as distant dreams that you might attempt to make a reality one day.

We usually set our weekly goals on Sunday or Monday morning. Who am we kidding, this week we're kinda taking Monday off and will be setting them on Tuesday! However, we always make sure our weekly goals are going in the direction of our monthly and yearly goals.

2. Make A Master To-Do List

Different things work for different people and we've tried everything when it comes to productivity. We tried scheduling things in our calendar, telling myself when to do what…but we somehow didn’t get much done. We always rebel against it and feel unproductive. It’s almost like, if it’s on the calendar today, we're not gonna do it. We'll do everything else, but not this.

Some of it is also: we know if we schedule a task and don’t want to do it the moment, we'll be procrastinating and not doing anything else. The reason? We'd be too busy blaming myself for not working on that particular task. “Why are you not doing this? It doesn’t make any sense to be cleaning your desk right now? You need to be working on more important things! And you’re still doing nada”

Well, we now work with a bigger weekly to-do list. This keeps us flexible if something unexpected comes up. And surprisingly we get so much more done. Using a master to-do list and setting our goals for the week has truly been a game changer for us during the past 6 months.

3. Make a Personal Growth Plan

One thing we highly recommend is to actually create a personal growth plan. Like what do you want to achieve in this life? Which skills do you want to develop this year that aren’t related to your current job? Write them down and take action soon after. The key to being a happier person, for us personally, is to always be improving yourself and to regularly seek change that you want. So whatever it is you want to explore further in your life, do it. Now’s the right time, you just need to make the time.

4. Wake Up Early.

We know we're a broken record on this one, but it truly works for some reason. We wish it didn’t. We wish we could just wake up at 8 am and finish everything we want to, take care of us and our home while still having some social life. But it doesn’t happen that way.

We currently wake up at 5:30-6 am, do 10 minutes of yoga, get ready and then start with the tasks we want to finish that day. This leaves us more time in the afternoon to enjoy time with others. If you want to learn how we get up early without feeling tired (most days!), you can read about it here.

5. Keep A Clean Diet.

It may surprise you, but eating clean hasn’t always been something we've prioritized. We've always been eager to learn about healthy foods, but eating clean hasn’t been a particular obsession of ours. We cannot force myself to always buy organic when sometimes it isn’t even available, to eat salad at an Italian restaurant when pizza’s right there laughing at us and pointing: “LOSER!” Or to read the label of EVERYTHING. Although, we've been reading a lot of labels lately.

We do try our best every day. We try to keep a pretty clean diet most of the time. Because we know a clean diet can help not only your physical but also your mental health. Therefore it can help you stay persistent with working on whatever you want to achieve in your life.

The point is, don’t make excuses about something so essential like the things you put into your body. Because they do affect everything else.

6. Don’t Snack While Working

Speaking of eating, this is pretty random, but, it made a difference for us, so we need to mention it. Make time to enjoy your meals and drink water in between. Not only will this prevent you from gaining 10 pounds within 2 months, but we've also noticed it actually keeps us focused on what we're doing.

We love food, so when we tell myself

“we need to finish this first and then we will have ____”

We actually finish what we started quicker and it feels so good. So not snacking during work has made us more productive.

7. Organize Your Home And Declutter

Listen, we're not Marie Kondo. We haven’t even read her book, probably should. We've seen a few videos here and there, but never watched her show. However! Last year we also got on the getting organized and decluttering train.

We didn’t throw out a lot of stuff, because obviously, we have issues, but we organized our home. We actually have a designated place for everything. It took us about a week to do it, but we felt so relieved, so grown up. Having it all organized saves us a lot of time and stress.

Another huge benefit we've experienced is this: every time we open those drawers and see how tidy everything is and that we can see where the scissors are without turning it all upside down, we get this sense of accomplishment and we feel proud of myself because we've done it. Such a simple change, but it makes us so much happier and more confident overall. Do more things you’re proud of. Which brings us to our next point.

8. Do Things With Integrity

Do everything the same way you’d do it in front of others. Be true to yourself and be honest. To us, there’s nothing braver and more appealing than people who are honest with themselves and others.

Doing everything with integrity means growing up. It will improve your life and it can also take so much pressure off of you.

You stop caring about what everyone else thinks of you and how you can make them like you because you do your best for yourself. Because you want to. If somebody else benefits from your actions, then that’s great. If they don’t, well it’s not your fault.

So for example, most days we wouldn’t have a problem inviting you to our place now (except that we're afraid of random people coming into our home). But our point is: it’s tidy. It’s not clean, but it looks like it. And that’s fine with us, we've accepted we're not going to be solid. But, we won’t clean because you’re coming, we've already cleaned our place to a standard we're happy with and we cleaned it for us. Because we want to live in a clean place, not because we need to pretend we're clean in front of others.

9. Practice Small Disciplines Every Day

This is key to getting and keeping your life together. Be disciplined with yourself and the things you want to have and experience in this life.

Okay, here’s another gross example from our life. When we started working from home about 2 years ago, we thought regular clothes were so overrated and unnecessary. If it wasn’t sweatpants or pajamas, we wouldn’t wear it to the “office”. Makeup? What’s that?

Now, this sounds like a lot of fun, but at some point when you do a few trips to the grocery store, it gets depressing. We had forgotten what we look like in a dress. Whenever we'd HAVE to go to an event and actually put on a dress we'd stare in the mirror and think, who’s that? She’s cute.

Our confidence started to suffer and not because someone else said or did something to us, but because we got so focused on working that we forgot to practice these small disciplines that made us feel good about myself.

There are of course many other areas, but the point is: practice the small disciplines, even if you don’t have to (we guess it goes back to having integrity).

10. Rethink Who You’re Comparing To

Remember to always compare your progress to your past self. Not to someone else who has had a different childhood, different parents, and different experiences throughout life. You can only compare to yourself a few months or years ago. That’s a fair game and something to keep in mind when you want to get your life together. Be realistic and do your best. Nobody’s solid.

11. Be Aware Of the Potential Of Everything

You, your space, your time – everything in life has potential. And we're pretty sure that potential can’t be reached. But we can always do our best and try. There’s always a better way to be. There’s always a better way to be using your time. There will always be a better way to do everything.

So for example, if you’re a perfectionist like most of us women, try to reach for that potential by doing your best in a certain amount of time. Solid is not real…It’s solid. And mostly, if not always, real is better than solid.