How to Keep Life Clean: Physically + Digitally
Ensuring your workspace is clean and tidy can go a long way to boosting your productivity and protecting your wellbeing.
Cluttered spaces are harder to concentrate in and provide endless scope for distractions. This isn’t only true in terms of the physical space but also digitally which, let’s be honest, is where most of us spend a lot of time working now.
“Yes, yes I know…” I can hear you saying with a roll of your eyes… “But I’m a busy business owner, HOW do I keep my space clean and tidy?” Well, I’m sorry to say that there’s no simple ‘one approach fits all.’ Allow me to offer a few suggestions though. If one of them resonates with you then fabulous, give that a try. Otherwise, play around with a few of them to figure out what works best for you and your business.
You’re going to see the word ‘boundaries’ appear a lot in these posts and it’s relevant again when thinking about cleaning. Setting some kind of limit, whether it be with time or objects, can make cleaning feel a lot more manageable. For example, I’m going to tidy my office / workspace for 10 minutes every day (with the windows open – remember that thing about the air flow?) Or, I’m going to tidy seven objects each day and put them back in their place.
The digital version of this would be, ‘I’m going to clear up my files / where things are saved to for 10 minutes a day.’ Or, I’m going to pick 3 documents that need reorganising and sort my way through those. Of course, this will look different for each of you. Please make it fit for your business! The idea stands though, that by imposing some kind of limit – you make the task feel less onerous.
Set a timer. Make it a game. Have fun with it!
If you have a team then make it a challenge. Do it at the start or end of every day with music blaring. Sing along to ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ and take a moment to step outside of work day. The more fun we can make these slightly boring tasks, the better we will feel about them.
However… I know that some of you will be reading this thinking “this sounds lovely but I know myself and I’m never going to stick to that!” Maybe you would for a couple of days, but certainly not in the longer term. That’s ok! We all have different brains, different challenges and our own ways of working. Please don’t think that you have to conform to how someone else does something. If it doesn’t work for you then that’s pointless. What we want is the end result, in this case: a clean workspace; but the journey to get there may look completely different for all of us.
For some people, a thorough clean and tidy at the start of every month feels much more manageable. Set aside a couple of hours, give things a thorough going over and then start again. Beyond that, this may be a quarterly job for you. If cleaning daily would actually just become a form of procrastination for you, then skip it and do it in blocks of time that work for you.
Whichever option you choose, I would really recommend you get time in the diary for this. It’s the kind of obvious thing that becomes incredibly easy to overlook but can shift the needle on how we’re feeling and working.
MY ACTION PLAN:
· Decide how and when you will clean and tidy your work space: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly…
· Set a daily / weekly reminder or get some time in the diary as to when you’re going to take care of this.
· If cleaning and / or tidying is something you really don’t want to do, then treat yourself to a little reward afterwards to keep your motivation there.
