The Life Box: Intentionally Organizing Life
Written by Christy Mark (Care Manager)
How do you organize your life? Who taught you how to organize your life? What systems do you utilize to stay on track? Many of us pick up habits of organization from our family of origin, some learn organizational tools from teachers or others along the way. Some of us have adapted, as life unfolds. At Elizabeth House, we use the Life Box as a helpful starting point.
The Life Box is a portable file box that provides a place for our women to organize important documentation from their life. Many of us have experienced crisis, evacuations, or the need for quick movement. This totable tool equips our women to organize, with the ability to relocate quickly, while not losing the documentation that will help them continue moving forward in life.
The Life Box is more than just a filing mechanism. It is an integrative system that responds to our need for organization and intentionality used by our residents, alumni and community clients when they enter care at Elizabeth House. Residents are given a Life Box when they begin meeting for weekly Care Management appointments.
Each Life Box contains file folders labeled with common categories to help manage tasks, goals, and projects for increased productivity, clarity, and reduced stress. From Calendars, to Medical information, to Identification, to Social Services applications and much more.
Time spent in Care Management at Elizabeth House integrates additional organizational scaffolding tools to help each woman set up routines to bring about increasingly efficient use of time, energy, resources and attention.
Intentionally organizing your life can be transformative, but the reality remains: a tool is only useful to the extent that it is well implemented by the user. Without practice, the Life Box can overflow and lose its purpose. That’s why meeting regularly to check in on Life Box organization is a part of care management sessions, building in weekly rhythms of healthy routine. Once a week we check in on calendar items, finances, SMART goal setting and tasks. I have found that it helps to have a thinking partner to keep you company during the more mundane chores of life. Speaking as Elizabeth House’s Care Manager, the spark of joy I see on our women’s faces when they show me their organized Life Box, and the excitement they share when they achieve their hard-fought goals lets me know that we’re on the right path.
