Making things better right away
What if the bird is just as relaxed below the surface as it appears to be above? (Image by Jürgen)
I’ve often written about Dana K. White and her unique approach to decluttering.
In any decluttering project, she says to start with the visible clutter first.
In addition, the goal is to “make only progress.”
That means that you don’t take everything out of your closet and dump it on the floor in the middle of the room.
That violates both rules. You’ve taken all of that stuff that was hidden away and turned it into an immediate and obvious problem.
In short, you’ve made a mess — one that may take multiple days to clean up.
For a lot of us, who are only able to make improvements to our systems in the tiny slivers of time in and around our personal and professional obligations, this is a hopeless situation. However, if we integrate the decluttering into the work we’re already doing, we can start to make some progress.
In my work, I apply this principle to the daily work of entrepreneurs and executives. Just as we evaluate the wayward household item that has landed on the dining room table and assess whether to keep it and, if so, where its home should be, we can look at the challenges that pop up during the workday and treat each one as an opportunity to make things better now and in the future.
A massive audit that takes days to do — the business equivalent of pulling everything out of the closet — makes us feel like we’re making progress. However, not only does it take a lot of time, we might find that we have trouble sticking to changes when we make a lot of them all at once. Gradually, we will sink back into our old ways and the effort will have been wasted.
Thus, instead of doing a big overhaul, we will make tweaks. A little annoyance — an employee not doing what they said they would do, a request from a client that is not in line with the scope of work — can be an indicator of a missing upstream or downstream system, a difficult conversation that needs to be had, or a decision that needs to be made. We can address not only the current issue but the possible cause, thus preventing the same thing from happening again.
Many times, these little challenges that come up can point us to assumptions that could be questioned or beliefs that are not serving us.
For example, we might be frustrated to receive a document that needs heavy revisions. In the past, we may have taken on the responsibility for making these revisions ourself. We’re afraid that our negative feedback to the writer will not be received well, so we don’t give it.
When we recognize this pattern and the hassle it is causing us, we might be willing to try a different way. We can give the necessary feedback in the spirit of coaching the writer on our team, upholding the existing agreement, and improving both our feedback-giving skills and our tolerance for uncomfortable conversations. There is no guarantee that the writer or the writing will improve, but we will have made steps toward a more promising long-term solution for this problem (even if that means finding a different writer).
We can make a game out of finding things to optimize in our daily work. Over time, these small tweaks can lead us to powerful insights that result in bold transformations. It begins with finding a seemingly insignificant wrinkle in the fabric of your world and smoothing it out right then and there. These minor changes are worth the effort in the long run, but we won’t have to wait to enjoy the benefit.
