Do you ever get the feeling that your life is a mess? You can’t find what you’re looking for, events are slipping your mind, you slowly feel your goals fading away. It happens to the best of us. However, just because it happens doesn’t mean it is ok to keep living life that way. What’s important is that you’re mindful of when it is happening so that you can regroup and get organized. Although we are no Marie Kondo, we’ve picked up a thing or two on organization from being stay-at-home business owners. Here are our tips on how to get and stay organized:

The tidiness of your room correlates with the tidiness of your mind. There’s just something about having a messy room that bothers your conscious, it’s almost like a fly buzzing in your ear all day long. Especially if you are actually spending a significant amount of time inside said room. It’s hard to focus on anything when you know that your things are out of place, surfaces are dirty, and you can’t find what you’re looking for. Also when your surroundings are messy you can’t help but feel like you are a mess.

What has worked for us is creating a cleaning schedule. Instead of cleaning everything at once, break it up into blocks throughout the week based on what works for your schedule. For example, wipe the surfaces every Monday morning, vacuum every Thursday afternoon, organize your closet at the start of every season. The routine you build will help ensure that your space doesn’t get out of control as it usually does shortly after you spend a whole day cleaning. Clean room, clear mind.

To-do lists are well-known to almost any person trying to get organized. Visually being reminded of what you need to do and crossing it off a list does wonders to your productivity. But while it’s wise to make a to-do list, it is even wiser to make several to-do lists, not just one. Instead make three: one at the beginning of the month, one at the beginning of each week, and one at the beginning of each day. This way you organize your tasks and goals into categories that will better help you achieve them.

For example, for the month of March, one of the items on your list is “get a new job”. That’s a pretty vague to-do item and more of a goal, but it’s important to write it down so that each week when you write your weekly to-do list, you can look back and see how you can accomplish that. So if “get a new job” is on your monthly to-do list, on your weekly to-do list you can write “apply to 5 companies” and then when you write your daily to-do list you will add “apply to human resource position at Facebook”. Your monthly list has been broken down into actionable tasks you can accomplish each day of that month.

At Cobalt & Sapphire, we’re pretty old-school in the sense that we like to write things down using good ole pen and paper. We love all planning resources we can physically touch and write in, but recently we’ve started utilizing our phone and it’s been a game changer. For example, when we don’t want to forget to do something, we go into our phone’s calendar and add an event, for example “book flight”, and set it at a time that we know we’ll be available, say 8 pm. Don’t forget to turn the alert on. That way, when it hits 8 pm that night, we’ll remember to book the flight that we were discussing earlier, which could have very easily escaped our mind. This is great for setting reminders of things to do so that our lives stay organized and nothing slips through the cracks.

Other apps that are good for organizing your life include:

Lastpass – remembers your passwords and other information and stores it securely in a ‘vault’, which syncs with any device automatically. This is great for accessing your passwords wherever you are, no more clicking “I forgot my password” and resetting it through your email. That’s precious time you could be using somewhere else.

Unroll.me – get rid of those annoying, unwanted emails you are subscribed to. This app will scan your inbox, provide you with a list of your subscriptions, then, from that list, you can choose to either unsubscribe, keep the subscription, or add it to a rollup—a compilation of any subscriptions that you choose to stick together that you will then receive as one solitary email once a week. Genius!

Pocket – gives you a space to save every article, video, and image you find on the web or social media. Basically, no more bookmarking! You can create lists such as “cooking recipes”, “movies to watch”, “funny memes” and save content that you find as you go. Even better, you have the option of sharing any of your saved media with The Pocket community or on any social media platforms.