289: Organize Your Schedule Like a Pinterest-Worthy Closet // Reachel Bagley

May 1, 2023

Posted in Balance, Bolster Your Boundaries, Declutter Your Motherhood, For Everyone, Managing the Home, Rock Your Routines

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Announcement:

I’m so excited to announce that I am finally turning my Declutter Your Motherhood workshop into an online workshop that will be available for purchase in time for Mother’s Day.

If you’re intrigued by this process of decluttering not just your physical items, but also a lot of your internal clutter and your expectations for yourself, I invite you to join the waitlist for my new audio course. All you need to do is text the word WAITLIST to 33777 or sign up right here.

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I am so excited for today’s episode all about how to organize our schedules like a Pinterest-worthy closet. We have a bit of a series going on with the podcast right now, all about decluttering. Last week, we learned how to declutter a physical space with professional organizer, Candi Kidd, and today we are going to be learning about how to declutter our schedules with busy mom of four and professional stylist, Reachel Bagley!

Reachel is the voice behind Cardigan Empire, a personal styling company dedicated to embracing body types and finding attainable beauty. Reachel has applied her skills as one of Anthropologie’s top personal stylists, a college fashion professor, and a fashion consultant to hundreds of individuals and businesses. In her work, she spends a lot of time in people’s closets, and she is here today to help us apply some of the principles of closet organization to our busy mom-schedules.

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Takeaways from Reachel Bagley on How to Organize Your Schedule:

Track your time for a week, as a way to “inventory” your schedule. This is similar to taking everything out of your closet before you decide what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. Once you have a full picture of how you’re spending your time, you can make decisions about it, including deciding if there are tasks you want to trim down, delete, or delegate. I love that Reachel said we need to think of everything we own as paying rent to be in our closets, and it should be the same for our schedules. How much value is that activity actually bringing to our lives? Because it’s taking up space, and once we see that, we can make decisions about it.
Put your tasks into “containers” or “time boxes” in order to keep them from taking up more time and space than you’d like. Reachel mentioned Parkinson’s Law, that everything will take up the space we give it. So instead of giving yourself four hours to complete a task, give yourself one hour and see what you can get done. If you need to come back to it later and spend some more time, that’s fine, but when we give a task a container, it’s less likely to turn into jello that spreads out and fills up more space in our life than we actually want it to.
Assign your activities a “home” or a location trigger. In the world of professional organizers, they say that our physical items should have a “home”…the place where we know we use them and put them away, so it’s easier to find them. The same can be true for the different tasks in our lives. Figure out where you do your best work, or workouts, or meditating, or whatever activities are important to you, and try to do them in that same place as often as possible. This will become a location trigger for your brain, so it can stay focused on the task at hand.

>>>Are these tips from Reachel Bagley helpful? What would you add to the takeaways? Tell us in the comments below.

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