Jory MacKay on January 07, 2025 How to be more organized at work: From tracking tasks to optimizing your time
When life gets busy, it can feel counterproductive to step back and take the long view. Instead, most of us are used to putting our head down and focusing on the task at hand. But, without even realizing it, taking the short-term view is killing your productivity.
The most productive people are ruthlessly organized — but this doesn’t happen by accident.
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Getting and staying organized requires time, effort, and discipline. Tools like to-do lists, timeboxing, and weekly reviews require work to get set up. Yet, the payoff is almost certainly worth it.
If you feel like you’re always staring down at an endless list of tasks and responsibilities with no time or energy to do anything else, it’s time to take a step back and get yourself properly organized.
The magic of getting organized: How small adjustments can radically change your life
Being organized is the ability to plan, arrange, prioritize, and coordinate the tasks and activities in our daily lives.
Those who master organization are often considered more productive, are less likely to miss important deadlines, feel less stressed, and often enjoy a better work-life balance.
Despite popular belief, organization isn’t a skill that you’re born with. Instead, it’s a soft skill that anyone can master.
So why don’t we? What puts many people off becoming organized is the time it takes.
When you’re busy, it feels like a waste of time to “get organized”. When in fact, it’s exactly that lack of organization that keeps most people on the hamster wheel of endless tasks.
It’s the lack of organization that keeps most people on the hamster wheel of endless tasks.
Once you get the right systems and tools in place, there are massive benefits to being organized, such as:
- Prioritizing the right work. A good organizational system doesn’t just show you what you need to do today — it helps you visualize the days, weeks, or months ahead so you can make a plan and tackle the high-value tasks on your to-do list.
- Less stress and anxiety. Being organized helps you settle anxiety by having a clear plan of what’s coming up. Having a plan is great for people who don’t like uncertainty, and also allows you to stay calm under pressure if things go wrong.
- More space to explore creative options. For those of us working in problem-solving roles, being organized frees up time and brain power to get the creative juices flowing and become more creative.
- Increased productivity and team efficiency. If we have a plan that focuses on high-value work, your productivity will naturally increase. Amplify this across your whole team, and you’ll find you’re all more in sync, leading to increased team effectiveness.
- Decreased dependency on busy work. If you’re organized, you spend more time doing the work, rather than working on the work. What do we mean by this? Fewer meetings, team updates, and alignment calls as you know what’s important and can focus all your energy on executing it.
- Reduced risk of burnout. The consequences of being overworked, disorganized, and permanently busy can be severe. Burnout is a real risk, especially in project management, so investing time in staying organized prevents you from becoming overwhelmed.
With all of the benefits, becoming more organized should be a no-brainer. So what can you do to master the art of being organized?
How to get more organized at work and in life
Getting organized doesn’t just happen on its own. Instead, the most organized people use a range of tools and organizational systems to help them plan their day.
Here are 10 of the most common techniques you can use to boost your organization skills — from setting better goals to ruthlessly prioritizing and optimizing the hours of your workday.
1. Know your goals (and set some quick wins)
In the workplace, we believe the key to being organized is to master the art of prioritization. When the tasks pile up, being able to step back, identify the most important activities, and deprioritize the rest, is what really helps the most organized employees achieve the best results.
As productivity guru Leo Babauta explains:
“Simplicity boils down to two things: Identify the essential, and eliminate the rest.”
Before you start plowing through work, you need to set yourself a target for the hour, day, or week ahead. This gives you focus, something to aim at, and serves as a North Star for any further organizing to come.
- Set good goals. Bad goals are simply a waste of time, as you’ll give up on them within minutes. Make sure your goals get accomplished by ensuring they’re the right mix of achievable and challenging.
- Add milestones to your goals. Long-term goals are great, but it’s hard to keep focused on them day-to-day. To help, break your goals down into regular milestones. Not only will the ‘wins’ give you a well-earned boost, they’ll also help you course correct if you’re going off track.
2. Regularly clear your physical and digital workspaces
Our environment influences us in ways we don’t always realize. One of the easiest ways you can calm your mind, stay focused, and kill procrastination is to remove distractions from your physical and digital workspaces.
- Reset your desk. Whether it’s notes, food wrappers, or glasses of water, our desk spaces inevitably get clogged up throughout the day. Bookend the start and end of every day with a tidy up, ensuring you regularly remove disorganization and clutter.
- Include a digital tidy up too. Files on your desktop, an overflowing downloads folder, and hundreds of unread notifications cause distraction too. Remember to also clear your digital space to optimize your screen time productivity.
3. Keep your to-dos in a central location
Capturing tasks is an essential part of staying organized. While the tool you use doesn’t really matter, you should choose something that’s easy to use and won’t get overwhelming (skip the pad and paper for this one!)
To improve your to-do lists, make sure to:
- Central location. Put your to-do list somewhere you can easily share it with others. This creates accountability but also helps you collaborate with others on tasks whether at home or in the office.
- Go digital. Don’t write your to-do list on a piece of paper as you’ll probably lose it, spill coffee on it, or forget it when you head to the office. Go digital instead, to avoid disaster and stay on track 24/7. Bonus points for a tool that is accessible in the cloud and will auto update across all of your devices.
4. Become best friends with your calendar
If to-do lists aren’t your thing, try using more of the functionalities within your email calendar.
Write down everything that comes up in your calendar, and set reminders in your day to come back to important tasks.
- Change up the views. To help you be less head down and more head up, try out a weekly, work-week, or even a monthly calendar view. This helps you zoom out of the here and now, and see the bigger picture of the weeks ahead.
- Get color coordinated. All calendars can be used to color-code different appointments. Use this to differentiate high, medium, and low-priority work, as well as separating focused work and collaboration meetings.
5. Break down large deliverables to manageable tasks
Analysis paralysis is a common cause of disorganization. When projects seem too big, picking where to start can be challenging, causing you to do nothing, procrastinate, and waste valuable time.
If you’re planning something big, here are some ways to break it down:
- Task breakdowns. Use task management techniques to break big pieces of work down into smaller, bite size chunks. This helps you make sense of everything, estimate the time, costs, and resources you need and take the first steps towards a plan of action.
- Use software to help. Project management tools, such as Planio, are your best friend here, helping you break down even the most complex projects. In-built task management helps you visualize everything in lists, on a calendar, or in a Gantt view. From there, you can easily share your breakdown with the team to help everyone get organized and stay on the same page.
6. Master the art of using templates
There’s a very good chance that someone else has completed similar tasks to those on your to-do list. Rather than trying to work it out yourself, there’s probably a template for it somewhere, saving you the hassle of boring admin.
At Planio, we’ve built out a ton of useful templates you can use for:
7. Experiment with different time management techniques
With your tasks organized, now it’s time to begin maximizing your time. Time management techniques are your best friend here, helping you break down your day to focus on different types of work at different times.
Here are two of the most common techniques:
- Pomodoro. Procrastination kills productivity. To help, Pomodoro structures your day into periods of intensity and rest. At its simplest, you’ll work in 4 x 25-minute windows, taking a 5-minute break every 25 minutes — whether you feel like it or not. This helps you stay hyper-focused, with regular opportunities to reset and go again.
- Time blocking. Rather than constantly context-switching between different tasks, time blocking breaks your day into dedicated blocks for different work. This helps you stay focused, but also sets organizational boundaries with those around you.
8. Ruthlessly prioritize — and remove deprioritized tasks
For many of us, we could fill each hour of the day two or three times over. With so much to do and so little time, you have no choice but to ruthlessly prioritize.
Here are two things to consider when deciding what to prioritize:
- How long has it been on your list? If a task has been on your to-do list for a while, constantly getting bumped down the list, there’s a good chance it isn’t needed at all. Any task older than 30 days is probably ready to be deprioritized.
- How valuable is it? If you’re choosing between multiple tasks, prioritize the ones with the most value. This could be financial, non-financial, or even happiness value. This product prioritization article provides some good ways to measure and prioritize task value.
9. Automate reporting as much as possible
So much of our daily work lives are taken up by reporting and admin. Whether it’s creating a report for our boss, looking at monthly performance numbers, or simply checking that your project is still on track, look to automate reporting where you can to save time.
Here are some tips to think about:
- Dashboards. Rather than running reports and trying to crunch the numbers, investigate how to create a live dashboard that updates crucial data in real time. Sure, it will take time to set up, but once up and running, it will save you hours and hours in the long run.
- Workflows. So many software products allow you to create automatic task workflows. Take Planio for example, with just a few clicks you can automatically progress projects, create reports, or update tasks based on other actions in the system. That means less admin and more time to do the really valuable stuff.
10. Reduce chaos and focus on work/life balance
Becoming a real master of organization takes discipline. Once you have your planning and optimization techniques in place, you need to juggle life around you to ensure you continually prioritize the right things, at the right times.
- Reduce chaos. Whether it’s at home or at work, try to reduce chaos, conflict, and unnecessary risks in everything you do. That means staying out of office gossip, using conflict resolution techniques, and working to create an environment of psychological safety within your team. Less chaos = less stress = more time to focus on organization.
- Work-life balance. You can’t burn the candle at both ends every day. Give yourself the best chance of staying organized by prioritizing a strong work-life balance. Periods of rest, fun, and play outside of work will help you re-charge, giving you the best chance to boost productivity and stay focused in the working day!
Putting it all together: 4 organizational systems that can help you stay organized
While a strong work-life balance will help you stay organized over time, like many things in project management, tools and work systems can really help, too.
Here are some tools you can use, on top of to-do lists and calendars, to help you and your team stay organized and aligned.
- Getting Things Done (GTD). Founded by productivity consultant David Allen, Getting Things Done helps you capture tasks and ideas in an external system to declutter your brain. By following a process of Capture, Clarify, Organize, Review, and Engage, you can get your brain clear to focus on the most important tasks at hand.
- Inbox Zero. For those who live in their emails, Inbox Zero is a productivity strategy that helps you stay organized by deleting, sorting, or clearing down incoming emails until your inbox is empty. Anything that can be actioned straight away is, with longer tasks filed in a ‘to-do’ folder ready for a dedicated period of focus time later on. If you like Inbox Zero, see how Planio Inbox can help you manage your project emails directly in the system.
- First Action. When things get complex, it can be hard to see the wood from the trees. The First Action productivity system (sometimes called Next Action) gets people to focus only on the next action they need to take in a project. No long to-do list, just one action that will move them and their team forward. It helps keep things simple and prevents analysis paralysis-type inefficiencies.
- Kanban. If you’re a visual person, Kanban is a great tool to get all of your tasks laid out in a simple, logical manner. Following Japanese principles of efficiency, Kanban is a pull-based system, allowing you (and your team) to take on more work when capacity is available. This helps manage flow, while also highlighting bottlenecks and inefficiencies over time.
Final thought: Every minute spent getting organized frees up hours of your life
Being organized is one of the greatest skills anyone can possess. But it takes time, effort, and discipline to stay organized — especially when things get busy.
But you don’t just become organized overnight. Instead, you need the right systems, tools, and techniques in place to help you manage yourself every single day. Whether it’s a simple to-do list, timeboxing, or a workflow management system like Kanban, there are many ways to keep organized and, ultimately, boost your productivity.
Project management systems like Planio have all the functionality you need to help you and your team stay organized and aligned, while moving forward as one, well-oiled machine.
Features for task management, workflows, reports, time tracking, and communication help you keep everything in one place, while giving you and your team the best chance of project success!
Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (and no credit card required!)
