How To Clear Your Mind of Clutter

Stop beating yourself up. You are a work in progress, which means you get there a little at a time, not all at once.
— Unknown

We all want to be brilliant, fully-motivated and active, and we want to do as many things as possible in 24 hours. But we all complain “I wish I had more time,” “I wish I had more energy,” “If only I could take that course once a week,” and we give up on half the tasks and commitments we had.

So, we all have many dreams and projects but we don’t achieve a lot. When you feel that we are not able to get things done, and this is immensely frustrating. What prevents us from crossing half or more the items off our daily to-do list is something simpler than you think, it’s something very close to us: it’s actually our state of mind.

All of our actions start in our mind. With the right mindset, we can get everything done on our to-do list.  As a result, what we need to do to get our things done is to change our mental approach to time management and organization. This is especially difficult for women and men with both a family and career to care for. For example, a woman with all these challenges needs to be perfectly organized, she needs a lot of energy and the right attitude to face all her daily tasks.

Image: Du Truong

Keep Your Mind Clear And Stress-Free

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open for everything.
— Shunryu Suzuki

The most important thing is trying to have as few distractions as possible to let our mind work properly on our projects and organization. Worries bring confusion and inefficiency, they slow down our productivity and they don’t let us focus on our daily activities – they make us waste time on thinking, worrying and trying to remember what we have to do. We are like computers, our brain is our hard disk, and it needs as much space as possible to work efficiently and productively.

What if your whole day were completely under your control? What if your mind were completely clear and stress-free? I guess you would be able to focus entirely on whatever you are working on. And you would know perfectly where things are headed. This would let you achieve both your short-term and long-term goals without feeling exhausted.

Eliminating all the useless worries and thoughts is crucial to make more space in our mind. This actually makes our brain work 100 percent efficiently. But how can we do this?
It’s simpler than it seems. According to David Allen, the author of “Getting Things Done,” in order to have everything under control, we need to “get things off our mind.” We need to create a trusted management system outside our mind, and we have to use it as our most important tool where we capture all our thoughts, projects and worries. This way our mind will be clear, stress-free and ready to work efficiently. Whether you use a list to organize yourself or a phone app to help you remember what is important, getting things off of your mind are essential.

Image: Vladimir Pustovit

Don’t Forget To Dream

If you can dream it, you can do it.
— Walt Disney

I cannot stress enough how important it is to dream. In all this chaos, we need to feel motivated in order to go through our challenging days. And there is only one thing that can powerfully encourage us to work for the achievement of our goals: having a dream.

This means being ambitious, and having that strong motivation that makes us work hard day and night to attain what we really want. So, what you really need to do is putting yourself in the state of mind where you strongly believe that you will soon turn your dream into reality and that you are working every day on it. You need to wake up excited every morning because of the goals you are working on, and you can do it only if you are in the right state of mind.

Image: Suus Wansink

 What you should work on…

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
— Joseph Campbell

As we mentioned before, being a working woman can be really challenging, if you are not well-organized or are overlooking some elements of your life, you can easily feel overwhelmed by your daily to-dos.But, what are these important elements?

The most important part of your life you should care for, especially if you are a working mother, is yourself. With this I mean that you must find some time to dedicate to yourself. During this time you could for example go for a walk, read a book or enjoy a hobby. The important thing is that you spend some time alone and do something that you really enjoy. You need to do something nice for yourself, every day.

Image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões

Another important part is taking care of your social life. This means that you have to make sure that you are surrounded of good people with a positive mindset, and spend time with them organizing nice activities to enjoy together.

Image: Robert Bejil

The last aspect I would like to highlight is your well-being. This is very similar to the first part we talked about, but it’s not the same thing.
This has nothing to do with time. This refers to the habit of regularly taking care of yourself, eating well, exercising, meditating and spending time with the people you love, understanding and believing that this has a positive impact on your life.

Image: Giuseppe Chirico

Featured photo credit: markus spiske via flickr.com

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