15 Systems That Took Me From Overwhelmed to Organized

If you feel like you'd be more productive if your life was just a little bit more organized, this may be exactly what you're missing. I used to feel that way all the time, especially as someone who grew up as your typical overachiever. There were areas where I did very well in, like academics, and then there were areas of my life that felt like they were always getting away from me. At some point, I realized it wasn't about trying harder. I just needed to set things up better.

Here are the 15 systems that allow me to work full-time as a behavioral scientist, see patients in my job as a clinical psychologist, and also share evidence-based principles here on this YouTube channel. Most productivity advice focuses on tools, but I found that a fully organized life actually depends on systems at three different levels. And if you're missing even one, everything quietly falls apart. In this video, I'm going to walk you through all 15 of the systems, starting with the backbone of your organization. This is the infrastructure that holds it all together.

The first layer of any productivity system is a capture system. This is a way of capturing all the things that are going on around you or all of the things that are floating around in your head and getting them all into one trusted system. I like to think of my capture system like Pokeballs. It's the thing that's going to make sure that you catch all the Pokémon. And in this case, Pokémons are random tasks, events, little bits and pieces of information. And you want to make sure that you have a quick and easy way of capturing it all.

Once you have this system, you're not depending on your brain to hold on to these things. In psychology, this is called cognitive offloading. And this is a fancy way of saying that we're not relying on our brains to just organize and keep everything up there. Instead, we're using external tools. They could be digital tools or analog tools, things that are generally known to be more reliable than our memory is for holding on to things. I use a combination of my cell phone and this little A6 notebook as my capture system.

When it comes to an effective capture system, you want to make sure that you have a quick and easy way to capture things. So, you're trying to decrease friction as much as possible. On my phone, my capture system is right on my home screen. I have this inbox right here. I click it and that takes me right into my notion inbox. When it comes to using a notebook, the key is to make sure that you have it on you at all times, which is why I prefer having a hybrid system because I'm rarely probably never going anywhere without my phone. There's actually some specific benefits of having an analog system as well. But the point is, we want to have a system for offloading some of those thoughts so that we're actually writing things down consistently.

When it comes to your capture system, it's totally okay to have more than one location. I try to limit myself to no more than two. That's because once you start developing this team of systems, they start to work together and you have a system of systems kind of like system inception. So, it's important that you can access your capture system and the more you have the more things you have to refer to as we move forward.

The next system that you need in this organizational layer is a way of managing your events. For most people, this could be done in a digital calendar. And I highly recommend that you actually do this digitally for a few reasons. Nothing makes you feel less organized than missing an important meeting or an appointment. And since most of us are already attached to some digital items, namely our phone, it's too easy to get your digital calendar in a digital system.

Digital systems have some specific advantages when you compare them to an analog calendar. Specifically, you can schedule recurring events in your digital calendar, so you're not always having to remember things that happen over and over again. Most calendar systems also have an alarm or reminder, so they can give you a heads up a few minutes before you have to be somewhere.

Most of the systems that we're going to review today are basic principles that you can take and apply to your life. There is rarely a situation where I'm going to give you some really specific edict, but this is one of those times. For your calendar, it's super important that you only have one calendar. Your calendar needs to be your single source of truth, and it's just too unwieldly to have digital and paper systems that you have to merge together some way. If you take just those two systems, you are already ahead of the pack. In fact, when I interview my new research assistants, I always start off by asking them to always have a pen and paper when we meet and I want to see their calendar set up. When we're having conversations or making plans, if I ask them to be at a certain place and time, I ask them to put it into their calendar as we're having the conversation. And having an external capture system just lets you write down any information that you might want to put into any of the other systems that we're going to be talking about today.

The third system that has allowed me to live a calm, organized life is having a task management system. Your capture system does the hard job of capturing the tasks. Your task management system identifies how you're actually going to get that done. Give this video a thumbs up if you'd like to see a full video on what science says is the most effective way to tackle your to-do list. But I want to talk to you about the two strategies that have worked out the best for me. I have two task management systems depending on the context. At work, I use one type of system and in my personal life, I use another.

When it comes to personal tasks, I enjoy having a context-specific task list. That means that I divide my task list up depending on when and where I'm going to do that thing. I have a task list that I get done during my weekly review. I have a task list that I do while I'm waiting for my son to get out of practice. I have a list of dreaded customer service phone calls I have to make during a lunch hour. My personal life is rarely requiring me to do deep focused long stretches of work. So I try to capitalize on these little pockets of time to actually group together tasks that I have to complete.

Now when it comes to work, I treat tasks very differently. That's when I use the Eisenhower decision matrix and I actually prioritize my tasks depending on how urgent the task is. So, how close I am to the due date and how important the task is to a specific project that I'm working on. You'll notice something very specific about both of these task lists. When it comes to my task list in my personal life, I have a cue for doing those tasks. When I am parked in front of my son's school, that is when I initiate that task list. When it comes to my prioritized task list at work, I am actually going to schedule in times to work on the task list. And if I don't have enough hours in my week, those are things that get rolled over from this week's task list over to next week's.

Next up is a knowledge management system. This is some way of storing and retrieving information. All of those little bits and pieces of items that aren't specific tasks, and they're not specific events, so they won't necessarily go into your calendar, but they're bits of information that you might need for something later or just information that you'll need to reference as you move through your day, your week, or your month. Many companies have already started organizing things like knowledge management systems. And given the amount of information that each of us encounters every day, this is a missing piece of some people's personal organization or personal life management systems, a way of organizing these vast quantities of information. This has led to concepts such as the building a second brain concept developed by Thiago Forte. I've also proposed alternative frameworks here on this channel.

I specifically like to organize my information when it comes to my personal life based on my life domains. So I think about all the different areas of my life and I like to sort information based on those buckets. So I have a family bucket with everything related to things like my son's school or my husband who's also a student right now. that information is in one place. Whereas all the information related to my physical spaces, things like my house and my car, they live in a different area within my knowledge management system, which I house within notion.

If you're trying to build a fully organized life using these systems, it also might help to think about things like naming conventions for your files. I like to use an eight-digit date code for my digital files and that's because it allows me to sort things by the date that I last edited them. It also allows me to do a quick eye scan of the titles of the documents by just looking down the files and I can quickly identify what I'm looking for. If you want to take a deeper dive into that, I'll leave a Harvard Business Review article linked down below so that you can take a look at different naming conventions and pick one that suits your needs. And while you're down there, if you feel like you're getting any kind of benefit from this video, I'd love for you to consider subscribing to this channel.

Before we moved on to our fifth and final system within this first group of organizational systems, and that is your communication system. This is one of the most overlooked systems and a lot of people tell me that they have tried many different things, different ways of organizing their tasks and their time, but there's something that tends to derail them, especially knowledge workers, office workers, and it is lacking a system for how you're going to deal with incoming communication. Most of us are getting these communications via email. So, it's helpful to have a system for how you're going to manage email. Fortunately, you don't have to make one up from scratch. We've already gone through and identified the different systems that you need in your regular life. And I use a parallel system when it comes to managing my inbox. Just like if I was out in the real world, I'm looking through my emails and I'm identifying when things need to be documented in my capture system. Is this a task that needs to be moved into my task management system? Is the email inviting me to an event? Is it a time and date specific thing that I have to attend like a meeting? I'm going to move that over into my event management system, my calendar, or is this some bit of information that actually belongs in my knowledge management system.

I'm a huge fan of having everything in one place. So, I actually tend to remove things or pull them out of my email and I move them into my notion system. For work, I organize things based on projects rather than the life domains or life areas that I use in my personal life. And in each project page, I have all of the tasks related to that project. I have all of the notes or the knowledge management part of that project. And I also have all of the meetings or events related to that project. This is why it pays off to have a strong organizational framework because you can use the same system that works in your personal life and mirror that system in your professional life.

Let's talk about some of the subtle differences within my communication system. First, I try to decrease inputs as much as possible in the digital space. That means that I have all of my notifications off via email. I don't have any kind of instant messenger in my work computer. And if people want to get information in, I have them send me an email that is going to make sure that I capture everything in one centralized location. Just like it's important not to have too many inputs in real life. I just keep it to my phone and my notebook. I don't want to have Slack messages, Google chat, whatever Teams has going on there. That is a lot of inputs. The more inputs, the more places I have to look to make sure I'm staying on top of everything. So, I work to streamline everything through my email. And that becomes my capture system. From the capture system, I decide if it's a task, move it into the task manager. If it's an event, I move it there. And if it's a bit of information that I have to move into my knowledge management system, I'm going to do that. Those are the five organization systems that create the infrastructure for your complete life organization.

Here's where most people stop, and that's why most systems fall apart. Having the right systems means nothing if you don't have a rhythm for actually using them. That's what this next level is about. And honestly, it keeps everything else alive. It starts with your personal tracking system or a daily review. This system is your ritualized way of keeping track of daily actions. Things like calories, steps, how much sleep you got, all of that falls into your daily review. Anything that requires daily action should be tracked on a daily basis. Science tells us that tracking could be powerful for both developing and sustaining habits. So having a daily tracking system along with the five organization systems that we discussed starts to give you a really powerful holistic organization system.

Every day things should be moving in and out of your capture system. And touching your system at the end or the beginning of every day also gives you an opportunity to brain dump anything that accidentally made it through your filter and is kind of living up there rentree. Some people call this a brain dump. And science doesn't necessarily indicate that doing a brain dump increases the likelihood that you'll do things on your to-do list, but it does have some specific benefits. In one study, participants were put into two groups. One group was asked to write down the activities or the tasks that they completed in the day. So more conventional journaling and the other group was asked to write down all the things that they had to do the next day. Things that were left undone, more conventional brain dump. Now, the study didn't find any differences in whether or not they actually completed the task, but there were some specific benefits for the brain dump group. They expressed less stress and anxiety and they were also quicker to fall asleep than the journaling only group.

I'm going to come back to these findings later, but for now, let's move over to system 7, a system for when things are going to get done, also known as weekly planning. My weekly review and planning session is a central feature of my overall organization system. This is when I review all of the events that are coming up so that nothing catches me off guard. And it's also when I look at my task list and I start to plug in individual times when I'm actually going to accomplish the things on my task list. One of the ways that task lists fail is that they just sit there without a specific plan of action. Actually combining your task list with your calendar ensures that you're identifying a specific date and time when you're actually going to get things done. It also gives you a bird's eye view of whether or not there's too many things on your task list. If you have 40 work tasks, but you also have 41-hour meetings during your 40-hour work week, we know that things aren't going to get done.

Besides moving things that are on my task list over into actual time blocks, my weekly planning also lets me identify when in the week does it make the most sense for me to do weekly tasks. things like when am I going to do my laundry, when am I actually going to be filming my YouTube videos, all of that takes place during my weekly planning session.

The eighth system is a system that most of my clients say revolutionized the way that they thought about life organization. This is a system for identifying how you're going to readjust when things change throughout the year. I call this my seasonal shift system. And this is how I address the fact that life is ever changing. Especially if you have school-age children, you might know that the summer looks very different than the fall and the fall looks pretty different than say the spring or summer. Some people also have parallels at work where one quarter looks vastly different than another quarter. I tend to plan my life based on actual sports seasons. We have one son and he does three different types of sports and he also has off for the summer. So that really dictates how my week is going to look like.

For every season I go through the exercise of developing an ideal week. That allows me to shift and adapt to changing circumstances in my personal life and maybe even in my professional life without having to start planning from scratch every week. Every season I write down all of the time-specific obligations that I have. That might be different meetings at work. And more likely than not, it is accommodating different sporting events that are happening for my kid or accommodating for my husband's schedule. He is in the military. So, usually what he's doing in different seasons looks very different. So once I have a general idea of what our week is going to look like, like a family, then I know when I can plug in things like scripting or filming for my YouTube channel.

Planning out what an ideal week looks like in these 90-day chunks also allows you to have better predictability in what is happening during that time frame. It's rare that I know a specific weekend that we're going on vacation in November at the start of the year. So, if I do an ideal week in January and I think that this is how my life is going to look like for the next 12 months, that is likely to be less accurate than the plans I have closer to that 90-day time frame. So, in September, I probably have a good idea of when we're going to be flying out to see family for Thanksgiving. And that information might be a lot less accurate in January or February.

There's also one added benefit to doing this seasonal look at your week. A seasonal examination of the obligations that you have every week helps you to set realistic expectations on what you can get done during that season. Like when December through February when my son has indoor track and I have to drive literally an hour and a half to drop him off and pick him up during the weekday. That means that it's going to limit the amount of writing time that I have Monday through Friday. So, that might not be the best time for me to dedicate myself to doing two videos a week on YouTube, but during the summer when both my husband and my son are off from work, that might be a good time for me to increase output on this channel. Or maybe it's just the opposite. When my whole family is home, I might want to spend more time with them and less time doing YouTube things. Having more realistic expectations helps you plan for a more realistic ideal week and increases the likelihood that you're actually going to follow through on your plan.

When you start following through on your plan, you increase what psychologists call self-efficacy, which is your belief in your ability to do a specific thing. Self-efficacy is a highly underrated psychological phenomenon where you actually need less motivation and less drive to do things that you already feel comfortable doing. Basically, your mind already has evidence that you are totally capable of following through on the action. So, the more you follow through, the easier it is for you to follow through. That's why this seasonal shift system is really transformative for my individual clients and it really changed the way that I plan and execute in my life.

All right, I don't want you to think that I totally skipped over a monthly review. Monthly reviews have a special spot within this group of systems in terms of keeping my life in order. My monthly review is really a goal tracking system. At a monthly level, it gives you just enough time where you can see progress in your long-term goals and it also is a short enough time where you can make micro adjustments if you're looking at quarterly or yearly goals. It also gives me just enough runway if I am working on a small project or if I'm trying to do a focused sprint. A monthly review system is perfect for these kind of short or medium range goals and goal tracking. And I use it for keeping an eye on year-long goals. Things like looking at my average weight week over week or looking at how many YouTube videos I put up month to month. I am not doing any kind of duplication here. So, anything that I'm tracking on a daily basis or on a weekly basis isn't something that I'm looking at during my monthly goal review system.

And speaking of goals, the 10th system that I credit with organizing my entire life is having some way of establishing yearly goals. There are several different ways that you can approach goal setting. I have an entire video on selecting the right goals. I'll leave that video down below. I tend to center my goal setting around what's important to me. First, I start off with a values assessment. Over time, your values tend to shift or change. So, I take time every year to do a purposeful pause and to reanalyze what I value, the different things that are requiring my time, energy, and attention. I do an audit of all of my life areas and my life domains. and then I figure out what it is that I want to work on over the next 12 months. This strategy is based on the concepts presented in acceptance and commitment based therapies. Science tells us that when you know what's important to you and you actually allocate time and resources to do what's important to you, so we act consistent with our values. We know that individuals report higher levels of life satisfaction and decreased levels of depressed mood and feelings of anxiety. So, every year I go through the process of determining my values and also thinking about my one and five-year plans.

These review systems are what keeps your organization systems working over time. But there's a third level that most productivity content never talks about, and that's the one that determines whether or not any of this is actually sustainable. Because you can have the perfect systems and still feel like you're running on empty. These last systems aren't about organizing your life. They're about protecting the person who has to live it.

At number 11, let's talk about financial systems. Multiple systematic reviews and longitudinal studies have found that better financial well-being is associated with decreased symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, which definitely gets in the way of feeling organized and on track, which is why having a good financial system is also essential to complete life organization. There are three things that have helped me get my financial house in order. So, I'm going to give you all three of them in this one step. The first thing that I do that actually requires some upkeep is having a payday routine. Your paycheck serves as an excellent trigger to get you to do the thing that you need to do after you get paid. When I get my paycheck, that triggers me to allocate my paycheck to different buckets. I do this using an awesome app called You Need a Budget. And it's as quick as clicking just one button because I've already decided how I'm going to spend my money, but I can't actually spend it on the app until I open it up and hit allocate. That is the only new individual action that I'm adding in this layer for this system because everything else actually integrates into other places. So besides allocating my paycheck, I also automate everything that I possibly can. So if you're in a financial position where you can pay all your bills when they come in, as well as your credit card bill, I highly encourage you to put all of those on autopay. I don't need to actually go in and pay any of my utilities. Those are all set up to be automatically withdrawn. And all of my credit card bills are also on autopay. So those get automatically drafted and I don't have to do anything specific other than allocate the resources within my budgeting app. I had a single holdup when I was trying to set this up and it was things that required inconsistent payment. So that's things like my HOA fees which I needed to send in every 3 months. I actually set up a payment plan through my bank. So, they actually send out a physical check to my HOA every 3 months. And I was able to do that through my bank, I bank with Capital 1, but I've also been at different banks across the years of my adult life. And I've been able to figure out ways of getting automatic payment, even if things require that kind of irregular payment.

Other financial things that are spread out across my systems. I do track all of my spending since I allocate all of my paycheck into specific buckets. So, I need to track my daily spending. I do that through the same app. You need a budget and that is part of my daily system since it's something that requires daily action. Every week I take a look at my balances so I know exactly how much more I have left in my restaurant budget, how much money I have left in my individual spending account, and that's part of my regular weekly routines.

The next system in this kind of capacity layer is some sort of system for managing your things. How do you manage your stuff? Because there's nothing that looks like you're more disorganized than missing an appointment or a meeting. But I would say a close second is if you can't find individual items in your home or office. Now, we have a fair amount of information in the scientific literature about extremely cluttered environments and how that can impact your ability to sustain attention, your working memory, and even your ability to shift attention between tasks. But most of that literature tends to focus on people that have hoarding disorder or have some sort of extreme hoarding behavior. But we do have some lab-based studies that are looking at non-clinical samples. And we do see that when environments are overloaded, people tend to feel higher levels of distress. They find that it might be harder to focus, harder to filter distractions. And again, we're seeing that same relationship difficulty switching between tasks. So, it's likely that there is a psychological benefit to having clean and orderly spaces.

Now, before I go into this, I do want to highlight that I am someone that really focuses on what you value and what's important to you. And that is going to vary person to person. So, when things have a specific value to you, that might be reflected in you having a higher number or a higher quality of a specific type of item. My husband has a lot of clothes and my son has a lot of books, and I'm okay with that because that reflects things that are important to each of us. But here's where we differ from many American households. We don't have this much of everything. In fact, we're commonly asked the question if we recently moved here because we have pretty bare walls and hyperorganized drawers.

When it comes to developing a system for how you limit or organize items, I found that these two strategies work very well for us. We either limit items by their specific number or we limit them by specific spaces. When we're talking about limiting things by numbers, I limit my items for things that I use all the time to one a day. So, I go to the gym every day and I have seven identical bottoms, all different colors, and seven identical tops. There is rarely a situation where I'm going to be at the gym every day and I'm not going to do laundry for longer than a week. But I only have one pair of running shoes and one pair of lifting shoes because I'm either running or lifting, never at the same time. And rotating between two pairs of shoes for a 7-day period is pretty good. There are multiple things that we only have one of. We only have one can opener. We only have three nail clippers, one for each person. And once we reach that limit, if one comes in, one needs to head out.

The alternative is limiting items by space. And I use this to limit the number of shoes that I have in my closet. I only allow myself to have as much shoes as can fit in one layer at the bottom of my closet. So, this is the amount of shoes that I'm allowed to have in this space. But right now, I am at capacity, which means that if I want a new pair of shoes, I have to give up another pair of shoes. For items that are moderately important to me, so for me, clothing would be an example. I also have some additional rules to make sure that the amount of things doesn't get out of control. So, for my clothing, you'll see that I like to have negative space in my closet. And I've limited my clothing options to just this color scheme. This makes it easier for me to shop because when I'm in a store, I'm looking for things in this color way. And after years of shopping and kind of knowing what works or doesn't work for my body, I also limit the amount of styles that I wear. Now, I just want to point out again that these systems are helpful if these aren't things that you highly value or that are really important to you or that are part of a hobby. If you told me that I had to stick with just one pen company in five different colors, I would be really sad about that. And you'll see that my husband's closet looks very different than my closet because he has a different value set when it comes to his clothing and how he looks and what he wears. We find that having these three frameworks to guide our shopping, focus on things that you value rather than trying to accumulate all of the things all the time. Focusing on a specific number of items or limiting our items to specific spaces, helps us to keep a nicely organized home.

Now, if we're talking about increasing our capacity to have a calmly organized life, it is important for us not to miss the importance of having some sort of system for health and fitness. Yes, this is a really big one that is going to vary by person. And I'm not talking about a specific type of diet. Really, I'm focusing on having a general philosophy for eating. Am I someone who is going to be counting calories? Am I someone who is going to be eating only whole foods? I'm going to be eating paleo. I'm someone who doesn't snack. Just a general philosophy for how you're eating because the default system within at least North America means that we're likely going to be hit with a lot of suboptimal choices. And if we just go into default mode without having just a general philosophy for how we're going to nourish our bodies, it becomes easier for us to just fall into the default mode.

Now, I'm not a dietician and nutrition isn't my area of expertise. My area of expertise is ensuring that you're decreasing cognitive load. So, if you have some of these mental shortcuts where you know maybe your eating window or what it is that you eat regularly, you're going to be able to save some of that cognitive bandwidth by not having to think about when you're going to eat or what you're going to eat or not having to reinvent the wheel every time you go to the grocery store. The same can be said with exercise. Just having some philosophy for how you move your body is going to be helpful so that you're increasing your capacity to be able to stay calm and organized. So thinking about are you going to get your movement in by doing 10,000 steps? Are you a crossfitter? Are you a weightlifter? Are you a cardio girly? Having a general philosophy for how you're going to take care of yourself allows you to schedule that into your event manager so you're actually blocking out time to do it in your calendar and you're also not having to decide every day what am I going to do for health and fitness.

I struggle with system 14 the most and it is a system for rest and recovery. Now, through the years, I have ebbed in flow in terms of my nighttime sleeping routine, but it is essential for you to be able to have sustainable productivity over time. Sleep, rest, and recovery is vital to that type of longevity. So, when I'm talking about a sleep routine, I'm talking again about not having to make decisions. having repeatable behaviors, environmental conditions, or cues that consistently produce high quality sleep for you. That is going to vary a little bit person to person, but we do know this within the psychological literature that there are some things that consistently support higher quality sleep. That is going to be things like having a fixed wake up time that has really helped me. Decreasing light exposure is something that I really struggled with because I'm someone that needs to sleep with some background noise. That background noise tends to come from the television. My husband likes to fall asleep to the TV, but that is a lot of light. So, over time, we've developed some strategies. Specifically, we can watch things like watch actually hear things on Hulu or Netflix on our phones so that we actually are not lighting up the whole room. and we can still have that kind of ambient noise in the background. Another thing that I struggled with, but now I'm pretty much addicted to is keeping the room at a cool temperature. Science shows us that that helps us have longer quality sleep. And finally, again, along those lines of decreasing our mental load and just falling into habit loops that help us sustain the types of behaviors that we're trying to increase. If you have a solid bedtime routine, you start to link certain behaviors together. Your body starts preparing itself for shutting down and getting into bed. That is one of the things that I'm focusing on this quarter is reestablishing a solid nighttime routine. So, if that is something that you're interested in checking out, consider hitting that subscribe button.

The other part of regular rest and relaxation is setting up some dedicated times or understanding what systems help you to unplug. If you are fortunate enough to be able to take some downtime from work or to have some vacation time, think through have an established system for what actually gives you the biggest bang for your buck, the most recovery time. For me, I found that being away from the internet and email is what I find the most restorative. So, I try to align my vacations for that. So, rather than thinking about like what are we going to do for a vacation, I have a few things that I know are high value restoration events for me. Wow, that was complicated. I know what is going to make me chill out. That is things like going to a cabin in the woods with no internet, going on cruises, going sailing. These are all things that remove my ability. They remove the temptation from me being online. And I know that that restoration for me is really about being away from those electronics. So your sleeping system and your deliberate break systems bring those together and that is a system for rest and recovery that's essential for calm, organized and sustainable productivity.

The last system is something that people rarely build and it's again something that I am working on this year and that is a system for moving your life experiences over into wisdom. codifying the things that you learned about yourself, the systems that are working or the little tweaks that you made when they weren't working into a standard operating procedure, a life SOP. Over the last few months, I've been putting together a written document that actually spells out all of these different systems and how they work together. Having them written down all in one place also gives me a nice reference material that I can review every quarter. And as I'm thinking about how things need to shift from season to season, I'm also looking at how I can tweak the systems rather than having to make a whole new system from scratch. I'm taking what already works and I'm modifying that or adapting that during my quarterly reviews. Because at the end of the day, having all of these systems isn't just about being able to do more. It's about having systems that make it easier for you to do the right thing consistently. I'm building a full video on how to create yours. So, when that video goes up, I will link it right here. And if you're interested in checking out more content around calm, organized, and sustainable productivity, check out this video that YouTube thinks you'll like.