My life hasn’t always been as organized as it can be. I procrastinate, miss deadliness, and forget about things. This leads me to an unorganized and unbalanced life. What can I do to fix this and become a better person?

This is exactly what we went over in our first project of the year. This year, I have a new class in my schedule called Personal Growth and Productivity (PGP). In this class I will be focusing on improving myself and setting myself up for the future. This project was called New Year, New Me. The driving question was “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?”

To start this project, we completed an activity where we talked about some successes and some failures from the previous year. Reflecting on the past will pave the way for a successful future as we can learn from mistakes and continue with our successes. Click here to see what I wrote.

While the main focus of this project was creating a balanced lifestyle, we also talked about happiness and how there are ways to train your brain to be more happy. There are 5 techniques that we put into practice to help us become happier people:

• Journaling
• Gratitude
• Meditation
• Kindness
• Exercise

Throughout the project we looked into these 5 things. At the start, I felt some of the different aspects were too difficult. At the end, I became a lot more comfortable with each of these. To see all of the reflections I made throughout the brain training click here.

Moving forward, this is how I plan to implement these:

Journaling:

I do not enjoy journaling very much. I think that it can be a great tool for some people, but I cannot see myself getting into it as it just feels like a waste of time. I will not not be continuing with this one in my future.

Gratitude:

I like thinking about who and what I am grateful for. However, I don’t like writing about it. I can get the same value out of this exercise just by thinking about it. Moving forward, I am going to try to take some time out of each day to think about what I am grateful for in my life.

Meditation:

Meditation was one of the ones I found the most difficult. By the end, I got the hang of it and was able to use this as a great tool for calming myself down. I won’t be using this every day, but if I am feeling stressed out or overwhelmed, I will take a few minutes out of my day to meditate with hopes that it will calm me down and make me more focused.

Kindness:

I loved the kindness exercises. Being kind makes me feel great about myself. I am going to try to be kind whenever an opportunity comes up. 

Exercise:

I have always valued exercise. I will continue to exercise daily as I think it is one of the most powerful ways to improve quality of life.

As I mentioned earlier, I am not a very organized person. To fix this, I went into the most disorganized parts of my life and organized them. Here is a video I made that showcases what I did to get organized:

Now that I cleared out everything that was holding me back, I could focus on keeping this balance in my life. I started by renovating my calendar. I added all of my reoccurring events and any upcoming events to my calendar. This way I know where I have to be and when. Here is a before and after of my calendar:

I also started using an app called Things. This app is useful for keeping track of my tasks. Anytime I need to do something, I put it in Things and complete it when I have the time. This is a before and after of my Things renovation:

I have been making posts on this blog for 2 years now. Looking back on my older posts is a great way to see how I have grown over the years. As part of this project, I went through my blog and made some renovations. I changed my subtitle to make it more personal. I also added matching featured images to all of my recent posts. Check out the rest of my blog to see what I have done.

What I Will Be Moving Forward With:

With regards to my organization systems, I will continue using Things and Calendar to keep track of everything that I need to do. I think that this will help me keep balance in my life.

One thing that we did that I haven’t talked about yet is taking time out of each day to make sure that I am using my systems to the best of my ability. I will be moving forward with this as this is a great way to keep me in check.

We also talked about taking time once a week to make sure that we have everything caught up and planned out. We also played with planning out goals for the next week. I personally do not like using this at all and will not be using this. I will be taking time to make sure that I have my week planned out in calendar. I will also be making sure that I have read all emails and checked in with any commitments. I will not be forcing myself to create goals that I won’t follow anyways. I think that this just doesn’t work for me.

This project taught me a lot about how I can become a better person. I think that using the strategies I have developed during this project will lead me to become a better person in all aspects of my life. This project required me to think deeply about what works for me and what doesn’t. Everybody learns a different way and it is up to the individual to find the way that best works for them. I am sure that by the end of this year I will have a completely different system for keeping balance in my life. I am now equipped with all of the skills I will need to be successful this year.