Spring Cleaning.

A Spring De-Clutter for Business!

Even though Winter is still lingering on, the earliest shoots of Spring are coming through and lots of people are thinking about starting the Spring Clean. It’s got me thinking about the fact that we work more effectively and efficiently when we have clarity. With less goals, fewer priorities, products and tasks, we become more focused and more productive. So, shouldn’t we be using this period of spring cleaning to declutter our businesses?

And by clutter, I don’t just mean that pile of papers sitting on your desk because I’m going to hazard a guess that the clutter on your desk is far from the only clutter weighing you down. I’m talking about:
• That over used inbox
• The schedule that has you overwhelmed
• The list of voicemails you still have to respond to
• Those oozings of daily distractions like reminders that no longer serve a purpose, social media notifications, postal subscriptions etc etc

Why You Need to Reduce Mental and Physical Clutter - 
With so much to do these days it can be easy to allow your entire to do list get jumbled into one so that remembering to buy that milk on the way home is right up there with developing strategies to promote your upcoming event when it comes to your list of priorities. After a while, the build-up of tasks can be so daunting that they lose all meaning and simply become an additional stresser weighing down everyday life. By de-cluttering and becoming more organised and drilling down into what actually needs done and when, you become more focused, become more productive and can begin to grow your business in the way you want to.

Strategies for Reducing Business Clutter - 
• Identify the clutter. Keep a log of your daily activities for one week. Is there something that is draining your time but not making money? Is there something that you’re constantly putting off? What type of things do you be doing when you are most productive? This will help you to identify the clutter and start making a plan to reduce it.
• Delegate when possible. I’ve said it time and again in these blog posts. Outsource the tasks that bog you down. If you’re spending a day making a poster for an event, you’re clogging your diary – outsource that particular task and focus on something that you are more productive at.
• Reduce the noise. Go through your diary and remove all the reminders you’ve set that no longer help you but merely distract you with a ping on your phone. Turn off notifications on your social media during productive times or put your phone on plane mode. Unsubscribe to those 17 bloggers you used to like and reduce the amount of offline subscriptions that come through the door.

While it’s all well and good to declutter now, it’s also important to set a process in place to declutter regularly to minimise the chances of overwhelm and overload in the future. Some helpful ways to do this are to:
• Put new systems in place – if you’ve just spent an hour or 2 clearing your inbox don’t let it just fill up again. Create priority folders in your inbox and move emails into them as they come in.
• Have a Virtual Assistant on retainer to help you manage tasks that drain your productivity, whether that’s designing your marketing materials or doing your books
• Don’t try to be all things to all people. Identify your best-selling products or services and focus on developing those rather than continually adding to your product or service inventory and taking time away from the things that earn most money.

If decluttering is proving to be a bigger job than you anticipated call the Business Development Team in Dungannon Enterprise Centre for advice on 028 87 723 489