My wife kind of pokes fun at me sometimes for the way I like to get rid of things.
It’s gotten me into trouble more than once.
My wife will come to me asking if I have seen something. Actually, now she just comes to me assuming that I’ve gotten rid of it and I don’t really blame her.
But I’m getting better with throwing her things away…
Anyway, I like to kind of audit my life once in awhile. I’ll go through rooms in the house and look for things that I don’t need anymore.
It feels good to get rid of things. You feel like you have more space. You feel decluttered.
Decluttering Your Daily Tasks
Just as we can accumulate clutter in our rooms and closets I also think we can become cluttered with daily tasks.
We don’t even realize it’s happening. For some people it can go on and on. We might feel overwhelmed. The signs are there, but we can’t see what’s going on and why we’re so burned out and frustrated.
If you’re feeling like you’re getting burned out or that you don’t have time to do everything you want to do then it’s time to sit back and look at the tasks that you do every day.
Unnecessary Tasks
One of the things I didn’t really like about working in a corporate setting was that people seemed to love meetings. Some would setup meetings it seemed just to say that they had days full of meetings.
I would leave a number of meetings feeling like the person that organized it could have sent out a group email or individual meetings with instructions on what to do.
I understand that meetings are sometimes necessary. It can be good to get face-to-face with people, but in many instances it’s not an efficient way to spend time.
But it’s not just meetings.
We all make choices, little choices, when it comes to our lives. We add tasks because they seem like good ideas and sometimes those tasks become part of our daily lives.
Some tasks add value to what we’re doing. They grow our companies, but many tasks just kind of take up time and don’t really lead to anything productive.
My Own Example
A couple years ago I caught myself checking Twitter first thing in the morning. At some point I had added all kinds of followers on my own feed. I could open Twitter every ten minutes and find all kinds of content that was interesting, but that maybe wasn’t adding to my life the way I wanted.
It was at that point that I audited my Twitter. I cut back on the number of accounts I followed and that led me to not check Twitter as much. I freed up time to work on other things higher on my priority list.
I find these little things from time to time. I’ll catch myself doing something every day or every week and sometimes I’ll force myself to sit back and ask why. I’ll go back to what I want to accomplish with my life and with my business and that will force me to decide if the task is helping me achieve my goals.
It’s not always obvious, but it’s good to at least take account of what you’re doing each day because you might be busy, but you might simply be busy because your day is filled with unnecessary tasks.
You Are What You Do Every Day
Over a year ago I wrote about how you are what you do every day. I still like going back to that post and saying once in awhile. I think it’s really true. The post was more about changing what you do like if you’re in a job that you don’t like then only you can really change it.
But sometimes we also have to look at what we’re doing with our business or with our lives and determine if every task we’re doing is really helping us achieve the thins we want to achieve.
That can be hard sometimes. We get comfortable in our daily tasks. Routine is comforting and easy. Change is not comfortable or always easy, but sometimes it’s necessary.
So audit your daily tasks and chances are you’ll find some that are unnecessary to what you want to achieve in life.
You may not be as busy as you think.