Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - The Power of a List - How to Transform your Life | Clutterbug Podcast # 30

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

A simple list can literally transform every aspect of your life. The simple act of writing down your dream instantly makes it a goal. Write down a few things you need to do to acheive that goal, and now you have a plan.  You can order my new book Cluttered Mess to Organized Success HERE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys and welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today we want to talk about really a fundamental organizing tool that can change every single aspect of your life. And it looks different in different areas of your life, but really it's all the exact same organizing tool. And that is a list. And I know, I know I've talked about this in the past and you're probably rolling your eyes right now, but I'm going to talk about a few different ways that a list can organize a list. declutter and transform not only your home but your mind as well like just your thought process and how you accomplish things and how you know even your success in life can really be determined by a really great list so i'm going to use the example of a grocery list here when we go to the grocery store

without a list you know for me anyways it's really hard to remember everything that i need from home i often and get great things that I didn't even think I needed. But I almost always forget really key things that I definitely needed. Some people are better at this than others. Some people are better at creating lists in their mind and being able to retrieve that information like my husband. He doesn't need a physical paper list. He's really great at, you know, making mental lists

and compartmentalizing those and referencing those. I cannot do this at all. I can't even tell you what I had for breakfast. I have zero short-term memory. I most certainly can't remember what I need by the time I get to the grocery store at home. So making a grocery list, it is like an action plan at the grocery store. It timelines why I'm there. It saves me time.

It makes sure that I'm always getting the essentials done. And I leave far more accomplished than I would if I didn't have a list. But the thing is, this doesn't just apply to grocery shopping. It literally applies to every aspect. of your life. A to-do list, a simple to-do list transformed my productivity. So every day I write down a list of the things I want to accomplish that day. Just the act of writing it down means that I'm more likely to get those things done. Just the simple act of taking a scrap piece of paper, writing things down every day means that I'm going to accomplish more in that day. And I don't

always accomplish everything. I rarely accomplish everything on my list. Sometimes it's a couple of days. I have to make the same list over and over. But I'm getting just like grocery shopping with a list, I'm getting the key things done. I'm not forgetting about them. And I'm motivated to really stick to the list more than if I didn't have a list at all. So to-do list, I mean, that's pretty basic. I really think you should aim every single day to write yourself a to-do list if you stick it in a picture frame on your kitchen counter, you can wipe it off, you know, and use a dry erase marker to refill it out again. Every day you can put it in a binder with a clear plastic sleeve. You can use a scrap piece of paper. You can use a whiteboard, a chalkboard, whatever it is. Making yourself a daily

list will make you more productive in life. That's just the way it goes. Let's talk about making not just a daily list, but a goals list, a goal for the month. Maybe you have fitness goals, financial goals, house goals, you know, professional goals. Having a monthly goal list, it's a list, it's still a to-do list, is the same type of motivation that a daily list does. It focuses you. It keeps you heading towards a single goal and it motivates you to actually accomplish those things, those action plans to achieve your goal. So when I started doing this, I mean, I've read a ton of self-help books. So many self-help books. So many self-help books. I'm like a self-help book junkie.

And basically, any productivity self-help book or success self-help book that I've read have all said the exact same thing. They're like, make yourself a goal, and then break that goal down into steps, and then schedule time for those things. And basically what they're saying is make a list, right? I mean, every single book I've read on this subject, being more successful in business and at home or getting more done in less time, they've all said the same thing, and that is list making.

And the crazy thing is, we all know it. We really do. We all know that we do better with a list, and yet very few of us take the time to actually do it. We forget. We forget, or we just, we're feeling a moment of laziness, or whatever the reason. But we're not making this a priority in our lives. And some people do. Some people are big into their planners, but there's other ways besides just a

daily planner that we can use listmaking to transform our lives. The one thing that sticks out in my mind is a cleaning checklist. I'm telling you, the day I made a cleaning checklist, I printed it off, I stuck it on my fridge, my house was cleaner from that day forward. It just was. I think I was more likely to wipe the counters every night, to clean the bathrooms, to do a quick speed mop because I had a list and it was somewhere really visual that I could see and I was motivated to get more of it done. Now, I didn't always do everything on the list. Life gets in the way. Sometimes sometimes I get busy. Sometimes Netflix draws me back to my bed and I'm not accomplishing everything on the list. But for the most part, I'm doing more than I ever did before I had a list. So a grocery list,

a to do list, a cleaning checklist, work that needs to be done around the house, making a master list of, you know, clean the eaves troughs in the spring, clean out the dryer vent so your house doesn't burst into flames. Things like making a list for those type of things. I'm actually doing things on those lists. The first time I cleaned the dryer vent, it was because it had sat on that list for so long, and I hadn't done it since we moved to the house, and I'm like, how bad can it be? Holy doodles. I opened up that. I moved out the dryer with all my she muscles, and I took off the back vent. it was full of lint. I mean, our house could have burned down at any moment. I probably never would have done that. Had I not first made a list of all the little things that I should do around my home and then put that list where I could see it from every now and then as a reminder.

And maybe this doesn't work for everybody, but it definitely worked for me. And I'm going to give you an example of how this worked on a bigger scale for me too. Yes, my house is cleaner. Yes, I'm getting way more done. You know, yes, my house. my dryer isn't going to burst into flames now. That's all great because of lists. But a list also helped me achieve a dream, achieved a success professionally. And I've been a hot mess my whole life. I definitely have ADHD. I have, you know, I can't focus. I have no self-discipline and I'm really impulsive. I have a very bad memory too. So a really short-term memory type. I don't know. My mom maybe dropped me my head or something, but I have a hard time remembering things. But I'm creative and sometimes being impulsive is a plus. Sometimes having ADHD is a plus. I can hyper focus on something for a really

long time that I really, really love and get a lot done. But it also can impact my life professionally. It's hard to achieve a bigger goal in life like being a successful entrepreneur or starting a business or, you know, yeah, doing something like that. when you have a hard time focusing on small little tasks. So what I did when I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I had to earn money. We needed me to earn money. I made a list of all the different jobs and, you know, steps to achieve those from home.

And when some of those failed, some of those worked, eventually I decided I love organizing. Like, I'm crazy in love with organizing. How can I make money organizing my own home? Listen, I don't sound crazy. How could I make money organizing my own home from home while watching three little kids? Is there a way? I'm not sure, but I looked into different options. Blogging was an option. Well, how do you start a blog? I didn't know. I didn't know anything. I could hardly turn this computer on. Let's be honest. I'm totally technically challenged. So I made a list. I researched and I made a list of all the steps I needed to take to start a blog. Then how do you

market a blog and so on how do you write a book how do you market a book all these little things that i didn't know have any idea how to do it all started with a goal a dream and then breaking that down into actions like a plan which was basically a list let's be honest and now i'm obsessed with lists i mean they have transfer i have i'm recording this podcast right now my desk is filled with sticky notes i mean you can hardly see the desk there's little freaking stick key notes everywhere of all the things all the anytime i have a thought and idea something i write it down because it has totally totally transformed my life and everyone that i've talked to who who say you know my sister she wants to start her own business doing essential oils i said to her

do you have a written plan do you have a written you know idea do you have something written down and she's like no it's all in my head and that's the difference that's the difference from taking it from dream to a goal, to a plan is the act of writing it down. I don't know what it is. I'm going to say it's some psychological mumbo-jumbo or something, but it really does change your mindset. It changes everything. It transforms something that's a dream into an attainable goal. And when you break it down further into little tiny steps to take, magically it's a plan. And that's what I wanted to talk you about today because I know I know you listening you probably have a dream or a goal whether it's maybe it's financial freedom maybe it's um I don't to go to Hawaii is something you we can achieve those things

when we have a plan when we stop dreaming about it and we start writing it down so say you want financial freedom and you owe $10,000 on your credit card now I'm bad at math so I should have I should have wrote this down before I see I'm impulsive I just started recording this podcast but So I didn't write anything down, but say you want to pay off $10,000 worth of credit card debt. So we grab a piece of paper and we say, okay, let's say we want to pay that off in three years. Let's break that down, divided by three and then divided by 12 because there's 12 months in a year. I hope somebody else is doing the math here. And then divide that again by, you know, I don't know, 30.

And then you know, well, maybe not 30. Listen, yes, 30. And then you know how much every day you have to save to achieve your goal. And so you say every day I'm going to spend. five dollars less and then at every month i'm going to transfer that saved money into it and onto the credit card i'm going to pay down that debt and in three years you've attained your goal but if you haven't taken the time to sit and write out the plan and do the math if you haven't taken the time to say how am i going to do this let's let's write it down and work it out it's always going to stay in

your mind as a hopefully one day but once you have that plan you know you're in the starbucks line you're like, oh, $5 for this delicious latte, maybe instead. I'll put that towards my goal of paying off this $10,000 in debt instantly. You will make that decision. You will prioritize your new goal, your new action plan over every day. It becomes something that isn't just a dream. It's a plan and it's a goal. So I guess, I hope this makes sense. I mean, I didn't do it for the longest I have to be completely honest. I just had all these grandiose visions in my mind and I just was running on my hamster wheel basically accomplishing nothing, thinking about all the things I could do in life. And it wasn't until I took the time to just jot those ideas down and then say, okay, well,

what do I actually need to do to achieve them and making a list of those things? And I mean, it took research. I had to research. I didn't know anything about anything. Once I did that, I was in it to win it, you guys. It was, the ball was rolling and momentum had started and there was no stopping it. It was just like a subconscious thing and in my mind just went with it. And that is what everyone says who has achieved any type of success in their life the same way. That there really is a power in a list. There really is a power in a checklist. There really is a power, you know, and having a plan in life, a written plan, not just a one day I'm going to win the lottery, kind of in your mind plan, an actual plan. And that leads me to a plug, but it's not really a plug, but I'm going to tell you.

So that is why I decided to write this second book. It's called Cluttered Mess to Organize Success, and it is a planning book, but it's not like a daily planner. It's a plan that has printables already made for you that says, okay, put your goal in here. what are the three steps you need to achieve it? So it has a chapter just for how to achieve your goal, how to plan. Because sometimes it can seem overwhelming. Maybe you want to start a solar farm. Well, that seems insane. How do you start a solar farm? I don't know. You probably don't know either. But in your mind, you want to be a solar farmer. Those things actually exist. I don't know. They're farming the sun. It's a real thing. But how do you get that? How do you achieve that?

well, I have planners, like printable planners that can help you break down your bigger goal into smaller goals. And then I have priority planners. So that helps you prioritize. What should you work on first? And then I have chapters on fitness. Now, listen, I am the last person who should be talking about fitness. But I reached out to other bloggers and other fitness professionals and said, like, what are the tools that you've used to, you know, make, you know, make health and fitness your goal and they shared them with me they shared printables that they've used they've shared planners fitness planners that they've used and I modified them a bit but basically I just blatantly copied them and made them

you know fit into the book so I have a whole chapter on health and fitness and and I made I made this book when I have a chapter on finance and how to completely transform your finances and my husband was really great at this and we we got married at 26 and even before we were married he wrote down a plan. He wanted to be retired at 45 and he wrote down a plan of how much we had to save every year and, and, you know, what our main top of our budget was going to be and then where we were going to, how much we were going to invest every year and how much we were going to put into an emergency savings plan. And when we first got married at 26, we had no money. And we got

pregnant right away and I wasn't working and still, he was like, we're sticking to the plan. I'm like, we're eating craft dinner. We don't get paid for another week. Listen, can we just use, and he's like, no, this is the financial plan that we are sticking to. And it was hard times, but we had a goal and it was written down and it was planned. And at 35, we were completely debt-free, including our mortgage, paid off, and we're well in our way to hitting that retirement goal of 45. And that was because of a piece of paper and a pen. That's the honest truth. It was because of that. So we have a chapter in this book on exactly what we did to achieve that goal of paying off debt, paying off the mortgage and becoming debt-free, all those steps that we took. It's in this chapter too. So yes, this is a shameless plug. I mean, you don't need the book, though. I'm going to be honest. You don't need this book to have the same thing.

You need a piece of paper, a pen, and a few minutes to just write out your goal. This book that I made is going to make it a little bit easier for you because, I've already laid out the work, but it's not something that you can't do without it. You can still, I did it without, you know, following a pre-made book. I made up my own and sometimes I failed and I tried and I failed and different plans worked. But eventually that piece of paper and that pen transformed my life. And I still have a long way to go. I mean, my goal for 2018 is to actually use the chapter on health and fitness. Let's see how that goes.

and try to plan. Instead of just saying, I'm going to eat healthier today, or tomorrow I'm going to go to the gym, I've never actually taken the time to write it out. I've never said, okay, this is my fitness schedule and put it on the fridge. Every Tuesday I take a class, or this is my, you know, this is my, I'm going to eat three sets of vegetables today

and drink seven glasses of water and it's here. Here's my plan. I've never done that before. which is probably why I've never been successful when it comes to health and fitness. And so that is my goal for 2018, to do, to make that the exact same goal, using the exact same method in all the other areas of my life where I have had success with a piece of paper and a pen. So I wanted to share that with you guys today. I'm hoping just, I guess, to inspire you.

I know some of you may be already doing this, but there may be like me, areas in your life where you're struggling and you're not doing this. Maybe you're amazing at, you know, planning your stuff. schedule and having a daily planner and you never forget appointments or birthdays and your your house is running like a well-oiled machine but everything's a mess or you know your fitness's goals are pretty laxing or you're having you're struggling financially there are other areas where you can take that your love of planning and apply it to that area as well or maybe you're like me and you you know you're not planning in any area and and there's hope I can promise you there's hope because

anybody, anybody can use a piece of paper and a pen. And even if we don't do everything on the list, it's going to put you so much closer, so, so much closer than you were before you made the plan. So my new book, Cluttered Mess to Organizing Success, comes out January 2nd. It's available for pre-order right now, like on every bookstore, everywhere, and all the printables in the book you get as a free download. So I think the book, I think it's $17. Don't quote me on that, I think it's $17. And then there's a secret code inside the book that you can go to my website and get all like one. It's like 125 printables by chapter that you can download for free and print them at home if you want to.

Or you can just have the book and fill it out like that. You can rip it out. You can photocopy it. Or you can grab a piece of paper, my friends. And who cares about the book? Let's be honest. You can just make your own. You can just make your own lists.

or find some free lists online. But anyways, I wanted to share that with you. I really wanted to motivate you today and just share what's worked for me, but not just for me. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other people who have had success in their lives are all saying the same thing. Their life was changed with just one simple list. So thank you guys so much for listening.

I hope you're feeling inspired and hopefully we'll see you next week.