SPRING CLEANING OUTSIDE OF THE BOX
Spring is in the air!
Actually, as warm as it’s been in St. Louis, Missouri, you’d swear summer had made an early appearance. This is the perfect time to schedule a spring cleaning with Better Life Maids. We do those things you don’t want or have time to do – like windows.
Pardon the shameless plug but we love cleaning and work hard to give you more time in your life so you can do other things that you’d rather be doing.
But since it is spring, there might be other places you might tidy up so the rest of the year runs smoothly. And these are areas we really can’t tackle. (Hey, we’re good, but we can’t excel everywhere.)
If you have a home office, and it seems most people do these days, it pays to clear clutter and straighten up that space. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking. These ideas can be applied if you work in an office, too.
Your email inbox
Are you the go-to person when someone is looking for an old email? Well, we’re here to encourage you to let those go! Anything older than 2011 can be safely deleted. The only exception might be anything needed for legal or login purposes. All those jokes from your BFF Joe can safely be trashed.
If you constantly save emails to read “later,” do you find that “later” never comes? Yeah, thought so. If you have something saved and it’s over a week old, it can probably be deleted or at least filed away. Remember, email is a quick response medium. If someone needs a reply from you, he will find other ways to get in touch with you if you don’t respond by email quickly.
Another space sucker is newsletters, blogs and RSS feeds you may subscribe to that show up in your inbox. The same goes for notifications from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Do you really need to know someone just commented on a post you commented on? One way to control this barrage of email is to create an email address solely for those items. That way you’re not stuffing your main email address inbox with things you might not get to for a while.
By culling down the excess in your main email inbox, you just might love all the room you find there!
Your computer’s hard drive
Is your computer desktop cluttered up with downloaded files and other miscellaneous things you’ve not filed away yet? Are there old things hanging around that you could actually delete? What about things you’ve always had the intention of reading/using/implementing but haven’t yet? If the file is more than one year old, you might seriously consider deleting it. If you haven’t used it by now, it’s probable that you never will. Might as well free up some disk space.
Since you’re looking at your files, could they be organized in a more efficient way? Do you lose time because you always have to remember where that one special file is located – you know, the one you use all the time, but can never remember where you put it? Same goes for files that cover the same topic or have some other commonality (think tax and accounting files). These could be lumped together and put into the same digital file folder. Problem solved.
Your physical desktop and workspace
It’s said a messy desk is the sign of a messy mind. Well, we disagree, but a messy desk does make it more possible for something important to fall through the cracks – or be thrown away. If you have piles on your desk, or nearby, it might be time to sift through them to determine if anything can be filed or tossed. Once you’ve made it through the piles you might marvel at how much more space you have and how good it feels not having that extraneous stuff staring at you. The key becomes not allowing the piles to reappear. I know, easier said than done. But it’s worth a try. Using the one-touch method (needs to be dealt with, needs to be filed or needs to be tossed) can help reduce the chance of new piles forming. Of course, since we are green cleaning company, we do encourage recycling where possible. Sensitive information can be shredded before it’s recycled to reduce the chance of identity theft.
By tidying up these areas, you may find your creative juices have more room to flow and the spark of inspiration can actually find you instead of getting lost in all the stuff it has to fly through to get to you!