BLT 11-Apr: Spring Cleaning – is it time to put your business before your home?

There are various theories regarding the origin of Spring Cleaning, most of them religious; e.g. for Catholics, the church altar (and everything associated with it) is traditionally cleaned on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. Other religions (Jewish, Greek Orthodox…etc), observe similar ‘cleaning-based’ rituals.

However, on a practical basis in the olden days, Spring Cleaning served to rid the house from the accumulation of dust and soot generated by winter fires in the days before central heating.

Either way, Spring Cleaning is now a euphemism for clearing out clutter…and it can be practised year-round, not just in March or April!

Clearing out clutter – a male v female thing?

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

– Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt)

A quick straw poll round the BLT table revealed that 90% of the men classified themselves as hoarders and 100% of the women classified themselves as declutterers, prompting some debate as to whether spring cleaning is genetically-driven…or whether one man’s clutter just happens to be another woman’s mess?!

Most of the men had some sort of system behind their ‘business clutter’, ranging from pieces of paper laid across the office floor (more visible than piled atop a desk) to drawers loosely arranged in order of ‘clutter importance’.

Obviously there was a limit to how much ‘stuff” could be hoarded before it manifested itself into a compulsive disorder. None of the BLT members present in the room admitted to being anywhere close to this…although a few looked a tad uncomfortable at the anecdote about (the comedian) Katherine Ryan’s mum having boxes of twine in the garage labelled “String too short to use”!

Tips for business decluttering

“Clutter is nothing more than postponed decisions.”

– Barbara Hempmill

1. Use legislation as a stimuli

• It’s surprising how many businesses admitted to feeling better at having cleaned up their contact lists (both incoming and outgoing) in response to GDPR.
• Perhaps it was the immovable nature of the deadline that focused people’s minds? Nevertheless,
• However, the flip side of legislation, is the temptation to hold onto hard-copy documents long after legally required; e.g. for tax purposes. Beware succumbing to this temptation!

2. Holidays present a great opportunity

• Create a file titled ‘Pre-holiday emails’.
• Move all unread/unsorted emails into this file to leave your inbox clean.
• By definition, everything that drops into your inbox after this point is something ‘new’ which you prioritise after your holiday without fear of being overwhelmed.

3. Use your computer as a filing cabinet…efficiently!

• Notebooks, post-it notes, jottings on presentations…because we don’t trust ourselves to remember everything, we take too many notes and then let these notes accumulate in piles. Result = information clutter.
• Make us of software to help you organise your notes online – I mainly use Google Keep, but other software (Evernote is popular) works just as well. This allows you to photograph images of your notes, and it then automatically updates between your desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• As a value-add point, I’ve often taken MindMap-based notes during a meeting, photographed the notes, and then emailed them to the client afterwards – one less thing to remember and this can then be filed online.

CONCLUSION

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery but the very foundation of refinement.”

– William Morris

The internet has provided us with unlimited access to information. However, there are limits to what our brains can store and process effectively, hence the need for better processes…or in other words, clearing out the clutter so we can see the wood for the trees.

Having said that, as illustrated by our BLT discussion, decluttering is easier said than done, although practised properly, it should be undertaken on an ongoing basis rather than as a once-a-year massive Spring Clean…doing it that way really is going back to the Dark Ages!