Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Get your life back on track | Clutterbug Podcast # 74

Episode Date: September 5, 2019

Feeling overwhelmed? Lacking motivation? Don't know where to start? In this podcast I share some easy strategies to help you get your life back on track.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, today we're talking about how to get back on track when you've just fallen off the horse of life. When adulting becomes so overwhelming, where you've started new habits and you've broken them, how do we get back on track? So thank you guys so much for tuning into the Clutterbug podcast. Today we're talking about how to get back on track when you're feeling overwhelmed, specifically when it comes to your house or goals that you've tried to accomplish that have just become out of control. You've definitely veered off course and how do you get back on? Perhaps you've been really great at keeping your home tidy and clean and now everything looks like a bomb went off or your business like me, this is what I'm going through right now, your business, you haven't

been making time for it because of other commitments and it's sort of falling through the cracks and things are just unraveling. How do we get back on track before things get too bad or before it's too late? Before I start talking about what you can do, I wanted to talk a little bit about what's going on with me and my business right now because I'm always totally honest with you guys. Right now I'm supposed to be running a YouTube channel, making and uploading videos. I'm supposed to be podcasting on a regular basis. I'm supposed to be writing my fourth book, which is actually a guide. journal, a decluttering journal that you fill out and work through in order to get over

decluttering challenges. I'm also supposed to be just doing, you know, all these other things when it comes to my business and I've done none of those things. My fourth book is due the end of September and I haven't even started it. And I can make all the excuses in the world. You guys know I'm filming a television show, but the truth is I do have to. I do have to be. I'm just. I do have to be a little bit. I'm have time that I could be dedicating to these other things while I'm on set, while there's downtime, after I get home, but I'm tired after a long day, and I'm making excuses, and I've fallen behind. So I need to get back on track, and I know that there are probably lots of times that you're feeling this way, especially right now, the end of summer, you're relaxing, the kids are home,

your schedules get out of whack, it's back to school right now for us, maybe your kids have already got back to school, but Christmas is coming too. And that's when stuff gets crazy pants. So let's talk about some really easy things we can do to get back on track to find that motivation again and to get our lives back together again. Let's adult from the beginning. The number one thing that we have to start doing is finding the root cause of the problem, why we're going off track in the first place. maybe there's been a death of the family or because the kids are home from school or because you've lost motivation maybe it's that you're filming a television show let's look at the root cause of what's causing the problem when we can take the time to really identify what's causing us to fall off the wagon

and get off track it's so much easier to make a game plan it's so much easier to compensate for that having that self-awareness of what's going on is really key so ask yourself why why is it that you've fallen off the wagon? Why is it that you've let the laundry pile up? What's going on in your life that's allowed that to happen? And I don't want you to just say, oh, it's laziness. I want you to really dig deep and see if there's a reason. For me, my reason isn't the television show. It's the fact that I'm tired and I feel like I deserve the break. I feel like I'm working so hard on this other thing. When I'm home, I don't want to be working. I want to be working. I want to be just spending time with my family. I'm away from them on set. I'm never away from them. So those times

that I am here, the last thing I want to do is work on my business. So instead I'm choosing just to spend time with them, which is great and it's admirable and it's amazing. But if I scheduled my time properly, I could still be spending time with them and work an hour at night after they went to bed. It isn't ideal, but sometimes being a grown-up isn't ideal. And, and And now that I've identified the real reason why I'm avoiding work in the first place, I can make a real plan to accommodate that excuse that I'm telling myself, which in my case is scheduling an hour every night after the kids have gone to bed to work on my business. The second part, of course, is scheduling the time.

It's scheduling time to get back on track. It's creating yourself an actual to-do list, prioritizing it, and then picking 20 minutes, a half an hour or one hour a day squeezing that in making it a priority to do those things on your to do list to get back on track the unfortunate thing is when we've fallen off the wagon it's hard work to climb back on but it has to be done and we have to schedule that we have to make it a priority and once we're back on track life can be easy again life can just we can let go of that extra hour or half an hour that we have to put towards something and we can go back into maintenance mode. But we have to put on our big girl pants or boy pants and get back on track. And that comes with

scheduling, with dedicating time. So I want you to open up your phone. I want you to block off whether it's an hour in the evening from 9 till 10 or perhaps it's at lunchtime. You're going to schedule a half an hour at work when it's your lunch break. You're going to schedule something or you're going to tackle something then. I don't know what your thing is. I don't know what you've done to fall off track, but scheduling and working hard for a short period of time to tackle those to do lists is how we get back on. Don't forget to prioritize your list. This is so key. Writing a to do list and scheduling time to tackle that to do list is so important. But when you take a look at your to do list, I want you to make sure that you're writing one through 10 or one through 20, whatever, however many

things you have on your list, prioritizing which one is the most important to get done. In my case, obviously all the things I want to do, YouTube videos, I want to do a podcast, I want to do all of these things, they all pale in comparison to the fact that I have a fourth book I'm supposed to accomplish. So that needs to be my priority. and I need to dedicate my time to that, schedule it, force myself to work on it until I get it done. Next, I want you to remember to get back to the basics. When we are on track, when we're adulting well, we're in a routine.

We're doing the dishes every time we're done making dinner. We're doing a load of laundry a day, perhaps, and putting it away. We're sort of in this little routine. And when we fall off track, it's usually because we've let that routine. go. So I want you to take time to identify what that routine was. What were you doing every day when you felt in control of your life? And what are you no longer doing that's making you feel out of control? Because that's exactly what we are feeling when we're feeling off track. We've lost control of our time and of our focus and of our motivation. So what were we doing? What were the basic things

we were doing every day when we felt when we felt in control and how can we re-implement those into our lives those basic small routines for me every morning when i woke up and i had a coffee i would write the things while i was drinking my coffee the the things i wanted to accomplish that day it would be a two-minute exercise but i haven't done that that's a small basic thing that i did that had a really big impact on my life. And that's the one thing I can really pinpoint that's been missing. And that's a big difference in how I'm running my business. And that could be the one thing I could start implementing again that could bring me back on track. Next, I want you to realize that good enough is good enough. So many times we want it to be perfect. And we think, you know, of all these

amazing goals we want to accomplish. And oh my gosh, the house is a disaster. It has to be complete. completely done and we get overwhelmed. We get overwhelmed when we focus on the end result. So we have to just like dumb it down a little bit. Get a little lazy and embrace good enough. Don't sort your colors of laundry if you have mountains of laundry. Just shove it in and throw in some detergent, wash it and move on. Let's take shortcuts. Let's see how we can really get back. on that wagon as fast as possible and in order to do that we really do have to let go of the idea of perfection we can go back to trying to do things perfectly when we're back in control of our lives but when things are chaotic and we're behind and we have deadlines and just life is out of

control we need to just take some shortcuts and really be okay with letting go of perfectionism Last but not least, I really suggest getting an accountability partner. I'm so blessed that every Wednesday I'm part of this meeting of fellow entrepreneurs and we meet online with Zoom and the whole point of this group is to be accountable to each other. So every Wednesday we meet, we tell each other with the goals we want to accomplish that week and then the next Wednesday we meet and we tell each other which goals we've accomplished and which ones we haven't and we really hold each other accountable we have to enter in slack what we want to get done that week and then a week later we meet and it's a 15 minute call and there's four of us

together it's a really fast thing but i'm like oh my gosh it's wednesday i have a meeting at 10 i haven't done these things and so the night before i know this meeting is coming and i race around trying to get as much done as i possibly can so that i don't feel like a total dink during that meeting because I haven't got things done. That little bit of accountability has such a huge impact. If you've ever read Gretchen Rubens the Four Tendencies, you'll understand knowing your source of motivation, I suppose. It's a really great book. But for me, I need other people to be accountable to. I can't just be accountable to myself. That really isn't enough. So having an accountability partner or an accountability group is a really great way to keep you on track and to help you

get back on track. That might be a Facebook group. That might be a friend that you reach out to and every week you just send each other messages of the things you want to accomplish and then next week you send pictures of what you've actually accomplished. I'm not sure what it looks like for you. Maybe it's your best friend and you call each other every Monday and you say, did you get this done?

Maybe you find somebody else and you guys play. life coaches for each other, you know, and you schedule a weekly meeting and you have coffee together and you go over your plan and your goals. And then the next week you see what you've accomplished out of those. It doesn't really matter again what your accountability partner or your group or what it is that it looks like. It's just a really positive and really motivating way to help you get on track. So I want you to think about who you could have as an accountability partner. I want you to think about if it looks like a Facebook group of strangers or if there is a friend or family member that you can reach out to and ask them to be your

accountability partner. So thank you guys so much for listening. I will keep you updated as I myself get my life back on track. It's fallen off the rails. But if you can relate, hopefully some of the things we talked about today can help. Thanks so much and I'll see you guys next time.