Increasing productivity in your life usually starts with identifying those areas or reasons that may be 'wasting' your time or energy. With the fast pace lives many lead it is easy to develop the bad habit of putting many things off till later. This results in an accumulation of clutter and remedial tasks that can when combined leaves you feeling overwhelmed. The situation is then created where effectively managing time is severely compromised due to a total lack of organization. This of course leads to not only stress, which nobody needs more of, but also a decrease in your personal productivity. The need now exists to restore order in your life allowing you to make better use of time while also improving your personal productivity.

Here is a 3 step process that allows you to take inventory of and restore order to the clutter that has adversely affected your ability to be more productive.

Sort

Whether it is unfinished tasks or a complete lack of order in your home or workplace your first step is to sort through the mess. Determine what is important and either list it or set it aside. Everything else needs to be discarded.

There is no use in continuing to accumulate non-essential clutter or allow unfinished and unimportant 'business' to pre-occupy your mind. You can make the best use of time by focusing ONLY on those things that carry some importance or have a certain necessity for your life or work. The rest does not matter and therefore should not be allowed to take up space or your time.

Organize

After sorting through various unfinished 'tasks' or physical clutter it is now time to begin organizing these loose ends. By eliminating a physical mess you are restoring order to your environment allowing you to maneuver more efficiently. When you organize or group any tasks or functions that you have deemed essential you want to simply group them together according to their relevancy.

At this point we are now well on the path to managing time much better since the clutter has been reduced allowing us to improve our focus.

Prioritize

With physical order being restore our focus now turns to our life and business functions. Having organized theses functions into their appropriate 'categories' now is the time to determine when each needs to be done. By determining the importance of each function and how often they need to be completed we can schedule these things accordingly.

With an established and document schedule that lists what we need to do and when it now we now have taken back the control in our lives. Our minds are much less cluttered and pre-occupied with sporadic thought s and ideas allowing us to focus on only matters of importance. Feeling overwhelmed is now a thing of the past as long as we maintain the control we have established through this process.

Increasing productivity often starts with reassessing and eliminating bad habits you have develop over time. The more you 'put things off' the more 'clutter' accumulates which will than challenge your ability to make the best use of time.  Getting yourself and your schedule more organized is the starting point for managing time more effectively in your life. The simple 3 step process we discussed is a methodical approach that can be use to bring order back into your life. When you are feeling overwhelmed and needing to be more productive you absolutely need to organize and re-prioritize any clutter that has gotten in the way.