Maintenance (Continued)

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Start of Year Maintenance cycle most successful businesses people go through. Fact is, unless you’re remarkably organized and suffer absolutely 0 external interference, you’ve got to dedicate some time to straightening things out.

Even if it works. Don’t lie, you know it doesn’t.

Fact is, over time we do find little kinks in our process or in our execution, despite of all the planning.

Success demands focus and attention has to be paid to even the smallest details. When you do that, you uncover tons and tons of efficiencies you could be enjoying.

Something as simple as cleaning goes a huge way towards organizing.

Typically I would never consider spending half the day just cleaning my office. But if you were dumpster diving today, you could have walked away with 4 Microsoft MVP awards.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the awards by any means, but over the years it’s made less and less sense to keep around my 2005 Microsoft Exchange MVP plaque. I’m not sure if the plaque didn’t mean much in 2006, nor if it rapidly depreciated between 2010 and 2011, but today it was just a day to get rid of it. I haven’t touched Microsoft SBS 2003 – but it took till Jan 3, 2011 to throw out half a dozen books about it. I even found books that I never even cracked – all in trash.

These are some of the things I worked very hard to earn. Now imagine all the other stuff that just came as a result of being in business – that somehow fell on my desk, then into my to-do pile, then into my filing cabinet and eventually in the archived items that should have been shredded in the long, long ago.

Important or Irrelevant

How do you decide if something is important or irrelevant? I have no idea, if you do – let me know.

I can tell the difference between actionable and inactionable: Will I do something with this junk or not?

Try it – now that you know if you’re going to do something with the item: Have I held on to it for over a year?

It’s hard to believe that you’ve had the best of intentions on working on something – something so important that it consumed office space – yet got untouched for 365 days.

We tend to hold on to stuff that we like even though we don’t actually do anything with it year in and year out. When you’re forced to look at it – you dig it – so it never gets thrown out. But if you’re not going to do anything with it, you shouldn’t keep it.

I don’t remember where I read this, but one of the sites had a story about how to clear out your wardrobe. Hang all the clothes in your closet with the hander facing towards the outside of your closet at the beginning of the year. As you wear/clean and rack your clothes back, face them towards the back of the rack. At the end of the year, look at all the stuff still facing to the outside (that you didn’t wear once) and throw it out.

We all have best of intentions – but only results matter.

The Point

Don’t rush yourself through this.

The more successful you get, the more “little things” creep up to cause big problems.

When I posted last week about people not dealing with external issues in January, many of you wrote in to say that was not going to be the case. One of my buddies even IM’d me earlier this morning to taunt me “Hitting the phones hard today!!! gonna prove you wrong!” and by 4PM he sent the following: “Not a single phone call today. Not one” – this is not a bad thing! This is a blessing.

Look at everything in your business that you don’t like and you’ll find a ton of them started with you. So look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and ask yourself one question:

How can I make this better?

Then write the list, put checkmarks next to it and get it done!

The more you get in a grove of making lists, reviewing your progress and improving your process – that much better you will be every year.