The beginning of the year brings renewed enthusiasm and energy—a perfect time to set fresh goals and outline steps toward new achievements. Alongside personal aspirations, January is an ideal moment to reflect on your career goals. While objectives like learning new skills, expanding your network, or earning new certifications often top the list, one foundational element underpins them all: organization. Becoming more organized might seem like a modest or straightforward goal, but it has the power to transform your productivity, reduce your stress levels, boost your sense of accomplishment, and accelerate your career advancement—even if it’s the only change you make this year. Here’s how better organization can propel your career success.
Step 1: Set Clear Career Goals
The goal to “get organized” is undoubtedly too broad to be effective on its own. Organization involves various methods and steps, so it’s important to identify strategies that align with your job and break them down into actionable, repeatable tasks. Remember goal setting 101? The SMART method—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound—offers a structured, practical framework to define and achieve your objectives. Using this approach ensures your efforts are focused and purposeful, making the process of getting organized both manageable and impactful.
Step 2: Prioritize Your Tasks
Let’s be honest, there’s a lot competing for your attention every day. It’s tempting to tackle the loudest thing first, but it may not necessarily be the most important thing. Are there better ways you can prioritize your to-do list? Here are some things to consider:
- Distinguish between urgent and non-urgent tasks using tools like the Eisenhower Method. This method adds clarity when tasks are entered into a matrix based on urgent/important, urgent/unimportant, not urgent/important, and not urgent/unimportant.
- Focus on high-impact activities aligned with your main responsibilities. Prioritize tasks and efforts that directly contribute to the company’s goals and deliver meaningful results. Try to concentrate your energy on activities that create the most value, rather than getting bogged down in low-priority or less impactful work. If in doubt, seek guidance from your manager.
Step 3: Create a Daily and Weekly Schedule
This step is particularly useful at lowering stress levels and is foundational to staying organized. When you’re confident that all your duties are accounted for, you won’t worry about forgotten items or risk overlooking anything.
Naturally, unexpected things will develop requiring your attention, but you can prioritize and add them to the schedule, or if necessary, take care of them right away and then get back to the schedule.
Start with a Morning Planning Session. Dedicate 5–10 minutes each morning to review your daily schedule and fine-tune your plan for the day. Identify your top three priorities and address them first.
Review and Adjust at the End of the Day. Resist the temptation to rush out the door. Instead, wrap things up so that you can spend the last 10-15 minutes reflecting on what you accomplished. Adjust your schedule for the following day, carrying over unfinished tasks. This mental recap provides a sense of accomplishment and puts a “period” at the end of your workday, leaving you mentally free for your evening and personal time.
Now let’s consider how to manage what is on the schedule. There are lots of ways to go about this. It largely depends on your preferences, workflow and job demands. Here are some ideas:
- Use a Calendar for Scheduling. Schedule meetings, deadlines, and focus time with reminders. Color-code events by category (e.g., meetings, personal time, projects) for visual ease. Block time for focused work, meetings, and breaks to maintain balance.
- Time Blocking. Allocate specific time slots for each task or type of work. Include blocks for high-priority tasks, administrative work, and breaks. Reserve “deep work” sessions for tasks requiring intense focus, free from distractions.
- Use a Task Management App. Use apps like Trello, Asana, Todoist, or Microsoft To Do to create and organize tasks. Set priorities (e.g., high, medium, low) and deadlines to keep you on track. Break large tasks into smaller, manageable steps and check them off as you go.
- Integrate Physical Planners or Journals. Many studies have explored the difference between handwriting and typing, and it’s clear that handwriting engages more areas of the brain, including those responsible for motor skills and memory, compared to keyboarding. Here’s a study that reveals how writing things down has a stronger memory encoding benefit and is faster than using digital interfaces. Call it “old school” but writing down tasks and appointments in a planner helps ingrain your to-do list into your brain more effectively. That said, you can blend pen and paper with digital methods to find the best workflow for you.
- Automate Repetitive Tasks. Set up recurring events or reminders for routine activities. Use automation tools like Zapier or calendar integrations to streamline scheduling if possible. Take a moment to optimize the notification settings in the software you use daily that will translate into making your workflow go more smoothly.
Finally, when you are putting this plan down on paper, be realistic about how much you can accomplish in a day. Build in buffer time for inevitable interruptions or overruns.
Step 4: Declutter Your Workspace
Keep your desk and digital files organized and clutter to a minimum. Clutter is distracting at best and stressful at worst.
A clean workspace promotes focus, while properly labeled and filed digital documents save valuable time when searching for what you need. The small habit of putting things in their rightful place, whether it’s returning a file to a drawer or saving a document to the correct folder, takes just a moment but prevents the chaos of misplaced items later. Over time, this discipline builds efficiency, reduces frustration, and creates a sense of control and calm in your work environment.
Step 5: Build Strong Habits
Consider ways to boost efficiency in your daily routine and then identify actionable steps to make it happen. We’ve already covered one example of this: establishing routines for daily planning and end-of-day reviews. But there are other opportunities where building strong habits can enhance both organization and productivity. Here are some examples:
- Stick to safety protocols as a routine habit – wearing the proper PPE and adhering to all safety procedures should be second nature; practice this if you need to.
- Stay on top of communication by organizing your inbox with folders and rules.
- Establish a routine for daily paperwork and documentation.
- Stop constantly checking emails. It’s better to designate specific times for reading emails and making or returning calls.
These new habits will require discipline in the beginning, but you’re creating systems that will save you time and hassle in the long run.
Step 6: Improve Communication
Has this happened to you? Your emails go unanswered, or messages get lost in long threads as topics change and switch constantly. You find yourself circling back to get answers. Or there’s a team member who relies on face-to-face interactions while another only uses online chat. While having multiple modes of communication channels has its upside, it often creates confusion and slows down progress. To enhance productivity, work with your team to establish norms around communication.
- Designate specific platforms for different types of communication (e.g., email for formal messages, chat for quick updates) to help team members know where to look for specific information. Set clear expectations for response times and prioritize important messages to prevent delays.
- Tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams centralize team communication, allowing for real-time conversations, file sharing, and easy access to past discussions. But don’t keep everything in one chat. By creating channels for specific topics or projects, teams can keep their communication focused and organized, reducing the clutter and confusion often found in email inboxes or chat threads covering too many topics.
You can’t single-handedly accomplish this on your own and there may be a workplace culture in place around this already – but that doesn’t mean it’s working well.
If you have to go it alone, you can lead by example: create a chat thread for a specific project and include other players in it. Manage expectations by adding a footnote to your email signature, “Please note: I monitor my email regularly, but I’m not always immediately available. I will respond as quickly as possible, usually within XX hours”.
Another good tactic is to stay alert to how others communicate with you. By using THEIR comms language (think love language) you’re more likely to get a faster response and the feedback you’re after.
Step 7: Regularly Review and Adjust Your Goals
Optimizing your organization methods requires ongoing adjustment and testing. It’s important to regularly evaluate your system—whether monthly or quarterly—to identify areas for improvement. As your priorities or career dynamics evolve, be prepared to adjust your strategies and goals to stay aligned with your needs and objectives.
Building a Foundation for Long-Term Career Success
Organization is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix, but you can develop habits that will make maintaining organization easier and leapfrog you ahead of where you are now. If the examples here seem overwhelming, then choose one or two to begin with. As those become easier, then add in another step. Over time, being more organized at work through systems and habits you create with intention will reduce stress, make you more efficient, and aid in achieving career milestones.
To get a jump on a new career and showcase your improved organizational skills, review our current openings right here!
