Be Organized: A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place

Today we have a guest post from a friend of mine. Gianna Lucarelli is in 8th grade at Sierra Middle School in Parker, Colorado. She’s getting organized – the first step in Project Management. Here are her views on time management and getting organized.

Some people have trouble staying neat and organized. Making goals and plans, organizing possessions, school life, and personal factors are all areas in which you may want to improve your organizational skills. Here’s a list of tips and useful suggestions on how to be neat and organized.

Making Goals and Plans

Choose a day to sit down and plan for the week ahead.  Most people prefer to do this on a Sunday – pick a day that works best for you. This helps you get into a routine.

Make goals for each day of the week. Use the S.M.A.R.T. system to help develop your goals.

S.M.A.R.T. stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timely

While creating your goals, go through these five words and use them as a checklist. Writing down your goals helps you to remember them.

Complete each goal one at a time. It can be very overwhelming if you look at all of your goals as a whole. Try separating them and think of each one individually.

Start the day by completing the most important goals and then work on the less important ones.

Organizing Possessions

Create a place for everything and make sure you know where everything should go. Do a daily room pick-up. This can be a quick little sweep through, just to keep you on track.

Aim to remove the bigger problems first. Do a weekly clean-up. This is different than a pick-up because you do a thorough cleaning of everything.

Put things away directly after you have used them. If you leave things laying around, your space just gets more cluttered and is a bigger pain to clean up.

School Life

Do your homework every night. This helps you stay on top of things and you won’t feel pressured. If you don’t stay up-to-date with your homework, it keeps piling up and causes even more stress. 

Don’t cram too many after-school and extracurricular activities into your schedule. You don’t want to be overwhelmed and overworked.

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61% of teens feel sad, depressed, or overwhelmed and rate their stress level a 5.8 on a 10 point scale. Adults are only a 5.1 on the same 10 point scale.

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Always have the needed supplies and materials for your class assignments. Make lists of what you need for every class so you can always be prepared.

Avoid absences when possible and try your best to be on time. All of the tardies, early departures, and absences add up. If you are absent, try your best to get it excused. Stay on top of your studies and aim to maintain good grades.

Personal Factors

Have a daily personal care routine. Take frequent showers and brush your teeth. Take care of your hair and wear clean clothes.

Learn to do your own laundry. This is useful when you have to wash something but your family isn’t doing laundry that day. This helps you maintain a neat and clean appearance.

Your family can’t take care of you forever.

Finally, keep your schedule organized. Use a calendar. Carry around a small personal planner to write down any important notices. This helps you keep track of all academic, extracurricular, and social/family activities so you don’t miss anything important.

If you have trouble staying organized, these suggestions can help. I hope that you find these tips and suggestions useful and be able to practice them in the future.

Citation:

Aleccia, JoNel. “Teens More Stressed-Out Than Adults, Survey Shows.”NBCNews.com. NBCUniversal News Group, 11 Feb. 2014. Web. 02 Dec. 2016.

Gianna Lucarelli is an 8th grader at Sierra Middle School. She uses her organizational skills to balance school life, chores, 12 hours of dance each week, and time spent teaching herself American Sign Language.