Read this: if life is total chaos, and you’re soooo ready to be organized

 
It’s Wednesday today, the day that I work with my private mentoring clients, schedule my meetings and take care of emails and admin tasks that pile up. Wednesdays are the best day for tasks that require delicate and eloquent communication as they are ruled by the planet Mercury.
 
I spent the morning on the phone tying up loose ends with Canadian immigration, went downtown for two meetings and to pick up root vegetables from the Framers Market to roast in the oven tonight, and then came home to an enormous pile of papers that needed to be filed away, and emails that need answering.
 
There was a time in my life where the words ‘structure’ and ‘planning’ made me cringe and shrink in repulse. I was certain and terrified that those two elements in my life would cripple my freedom, my spontaneity, and my adventurous spirit. I was so resistant to organising my day-to-day life that I would pass up opportunities in favour of having a free and open calendar.
 
Until one day, when I sat myself down and said: “Vienda, you are playing small. You say you want to do all these marvellous things with your life, but without structure, you are getting lost and wasting precious minutes of every day.”
 
It was a wake-up call. I was in the first year of my business, a business I created with the intention to help free-spirited and creative women to take charge and own their lives through manifesting, intuitive living and heartful, conscious enterprise after my own spiritual awakening that helped me recognize that the way most of us are going about life is totally out of alignment with our purpose and truth.
 
I wasn’t getting anywhere because I hoped that my spiritual values would provide me with the magnetism I needed to succeed. Yet I had failed to ground my beliefs down into the physical world with tangible and practical rituals and practices that would allow me, and my business, to thrive. I was starting to see this now.
 
Determined and willing to change, I started to approach my life in a more organized way.
 
I began using my Google Calendar for everything. A business mentor of mine once said: “If it’s not scheduled, it’s not happening.” I did not believe her at the time. I didn’t enjoy the very definitive circumference that a calendar created. But I tried…
 
I started by manually inputting my client meetings. Then I added other meetings too. I included specific work and play times. Slowly I noticed a sense of relief wash over me. With the most important things in my calendar, I had more mental space to think about other things, instead of constantly trying to remind myself of my commitments. Slowly, I gave the holding of my responsibilities over to my calendar.
 
Now, I let my calendar be the custodian of my timeline for everything. My client calls are automatically inserted by my scheduling app: Acuity, I have specific days for creative projects, rest and relaxation, my dinner dates and parties go in there, I even put in when I need to vacuum the house before friends come over for ‘art night’.
 
While my calendar is a helpful guide that keeps me on track and gives me the freedom to create more space for the things I love, I still flow with my intuition and am flexible with myself, when needs change. That means that,  if I have scheduled a productive day into my calendar, but I feel like I need to take some space and time, I’m ok with that. Organisational tools are meant to support us, not crush us.
 
Instead of allowing myself to start and work on tasks and have meetings haphazard across my week, I block specific tasks into specific days, with the help of astrology and the energy of the days of the week. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are for clients and meetings, Thursdays are for strategizing, copy-writing, planning and marketing, and Fridays are for working on my creative projects.
 
Everything in my calendar has a time limit and when I go over the time, I drop the task and move on. I notice that by having specific times to do and complete specific things in, I waste less time fluffing about with other distractions, and instead focus, and then let go, no matter how much or how little I have done. As long as I keep showing up and doing my best, I’m happy.
 
I have Saturday, Sunday and Monday off for other life-things outside of work. Rest, relaxation, fun and imagination time is just as important as learning, studying and working time. Putting those elements of my life into my calendar, and sticking to them, allows me to create harmony, space and time for myself which is vital for living a happy, compelling, creative life.
 
When I first decided it was time to get organised a few years ago I wrote 20 mantras for disorganised people who want to get organised, and bought a planner to give myself a pretty container within which I could methodologically arrange my life. A year later I had a system in place that I teach in this free workshop and share with my clients.
 
I’m an avid believer that organisation is the yang to the yin of creative expression and the key to living a fulfilling and extraordinary life. Instead of limiting me to a structured and linear way of living it actually provides the foundation and support that I need to reach new heights and grow as a very alive, spontaneous and creative human being.
 
This is why I devote 2 entire lessons to structure and systems in the 2-day workshop I have created with my incredible friend Claire: The Heartful Biz. We teach how to use natural cycles like the moon and stars as well as internal cycles like menstruation as pointers to creating an organized life. And we share how we use very practical resources and tools to help us maintain a supportive, flowing anatomy in our heart-led businesses.
 
The Heartful Biz is open for ongoing enrollment — you can join us right now — and access is instant.