For us, life laundry is about keeping things clear, simple and focused. It is about ensuring we don’t feel overwhelmed, over busy and conflicted with everything that needs to be done, and that we are taking the right steps to keep things as clean as possible.
Let’s make this happen in just 3 simple steps.
While you are putting these 3 simple steps into practice, don’t forget to be kind to yourself, be clear on the things you love, things that energise you and the things that drain you. And make sure that you do spend enough time every day on the nourishing things and minimise the draining things.
1. Goals and purpose
Have you asked yourself ‘What are my goals? What is my purpose? What do I want my life to be like?’ If not, please do.
They are big questions indeed, however, they are so crucial to answer to get our priorities straight. By putting your answers into a smaller number, writing them down, sticking them on the wall and keeping them present will ensure we have the clarity we need to stay focused. Once you have your purpose and goals worked out, you are ready for the step two, life admin.
2. Your life admin
This is, for instance, paying bills, getting back to people, confirming dates, appointments, seeing friends, spending time with family, organising holidays or painting a bedroom. In other words, it is doing things that are part of our ‘to do’ list. However, these can grow rapidly over time and become aspects we keep postponing and delaying if we don’t prioritise them in the right way. Therefore, what should we and should not we put on our to do list? Lets have a look at our main ‘to do list’ categories:
Important urgent: e.g. you need to call a plumber because your house is flooded.
Important non-urgent: e.g. need to book myself a regular check up appointment at the dentist
Unimportant: things that do not matter and have no impact on your life goals
So, how do we work out what is important and unimportant? Think Ants vs. Elephants. Go down your ‘to do list’ and mark each item either A for Ants (little unimportant things) or E for Elephants (great big things). Then remove the As from your list and only keep the Es. At this stage, you have successfully cleaned your list. Now, make sure that you put all the remaining tasks on your list into priority order and you can start actioning them.
3. Your surroundings
This is about your environment and making it what we want it to be. This relates to where you live and where you work; it’s about spring cleaning but smarter.
So the first thing is to get rid of actual junk that builds up around you at home and work by having a clean out whenever it works for you. By junk I mean stuff that doesn’t matter, that you don’t need, that could have a better home elsewhere, including the bin! And on a regular basis, do the same with your online life; apps, photos, even friend culls are a thing apparently, although that’s not just online I guess.
Clear surroundings = clear mind!
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