As we ease into 2023, I’ve really been leaning into our theme of simplification. As an entrepreneur and mother to a young child, time is my most valuable resource. I am constantly looking for ways to simplify and create more space in my life. I think we can all identify with the feeling of overwhelm spending most of our time on our “have to” items and not enough on our “want to” things. Thus far I have decluttered my bathroom to include only the products I use and love, cleaned out closets and home and at work and gone through that massive pile of unopened mail and catalogs I know we all have.
Over the years I have learned a few things that work best for me on how to simplify our lives so that we have more time left to focus on what we want to do.
- Get clarity. It’s easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed when you don’t have a clear idea of what you are doing and where you are going. Take time to get clear on how you want to spend your time.
- Build a better relationship with time. Instead of feeding into the overworked, busy narrative and saying “I don’t have time to” shift and start to say “I haven’t prioritized…”. We do what we want to. If you really want to do something, prioritize it.
- Get rid of clutter. Keep only what you need and discard the rest.
- Take a break from social media and screens in general. Pretty certain if you clocked the time spent scrolling through IG you’d be shocked. The habit of constantly scrolling becomes sort of a Pavlovian response and before you know it, you’ve racked up 2 hours a day staring at your phone. What else could you do with that time?
- Pare down and tweak your routines. Take the time to think through your days and find out where you feel stressed, rushed and generally out of sorts. See if there is a way to eliminate something or simplify it.
- Outsource where necessary. Press the easy button and outsource anything that you can afford to. For me this looks like house cleaning and laundry.
- Repeat after me. “I don’t do overwhelm”. I learned this from Marie Forleo and let me tell you it works, simply training yourself to move out of that space is priceless.
