Spring Cleaning

Seeing as today is the first day of spring, I felt that it was a great time to talk about spring cleaning!

We spent yesterday doing some spring cleaning at Tornado Marketing, it had gotten a little messy and disorganized from our trip and all of the things we have on our plates. We were getting caught up in all the ’stuff’ and were losing track of the most important tasks. I believe that spring cleaning is absolutely neccessary to make sure that your physical space and your mental space are set up for being productive. When there is a lot of clutter (around you or in your head) it makes it difficult to separate out what needs to be done, and what really is just ‘clutter’. The great thing is, spring cleaning doesn’t have to take a lot of time to get a big reward. Here are my steps to a quick and efficient spring cleaning.

1. Put on some good music: it’s no fun to clean unless you have either someone to talk to and work with or good music to listen to. This will also help you clear your head! ( i like 80’s rock and country…it’s upbeat and fun to listen to)

2. Create a pile of important papers: This isn’t the time to read them or try to work on them, if they look important put it in the pile and then put the pile aside, you can come back to it (remember, try to only keep the really important papers in this pile)

3. Create a file of maybe’s: If you haven’t used it recently but know that it has importance to something you’re working on or want to be doing, put it in this pile (c’mon….are you really going to need 3 copies of the same article?)

4. Get a big plastic bag: if it isn’t in the important or maybe pile, throw it away. Also, throw away the pens that stopped working, the cd cases with no cd’s, all the junk that you’ve gathered from daily working… (you can do it, i know you can)

5. Clear off everything from your desk: except your computer, a pad of paper and your important paper pile. Then go through the important papers and create 3 files. File them where they should go; Today, Tomorrow or Next week, then focus on them in that order.

These 5 steps will help you to clear out all the paperwork clutter. Just a couple hours of effort and cleaning and we are ready and raring to go.

It’s amazing what something so simple can do!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under Friday Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.