Achieving Simplicity

I’ve found the following questions can clear up much of the confusion and misunderstanding that happen at the workplace. When supervising recent college grads, I always give them this list of questions to ask for any new project. As a manager, I try to make sure to cover the information when giving out assignments, but I don’t always hit all the points.

When do you need this by?

I’ve been shocked by the number of times this simple bit of information is omitted in conversations. This has led to many late nights working on projects that I assumed were urgent and turned out to not be. Of course, there have also been times when I figured that the project was not as urgent as my supervisor thought it was.

Who is the project being prepared for?

I work in an information industry. When asked for data, it’s not always clear who the end user will be. While the output of any project should be professional, different notes or layouts might be required for different users. Don’t assume that it’s your boss that is the only one that’s going to be looking at your product.

How is it going to be used?

The obvious example here is an internal versus external report. Every company has things they would rather not have published for the world to see and misunderstand. This is closely related to whom the project is being prepared for. Formality is another key factor here. If your boss wants a single number, there’s no point spending an hour putting together a pretty spreadsheet; if the number is going to be presented to the board of directors, a little formatting would be appreciated.

Has this been done before? If so, by who?

Most programmers have an appreciation for the futility of recreating the wheel; in the business world, I’ve been amazed at the number of times people start over from scratch on a process that has done by someone else in another department or by a predecessor. If it’s been done before, ask for documentation, if it exists.

Is this something that you’re going to be requesting on a regular basis?

Of course, it’s always good to finish a project expediently, but if you know that you’ll be doing the same thing every month or every week, then it’s always good to be looking for ways to be more efficient. On the other hand, if it’s really just a one time request, then it doesn’t make sense to spend hours automating the request.

Decluttering

Photo by Basail

Until recently, I would proudly declare, whenever the subject came up, that clutter wasn’t a problem for me. It didn’t bother me. It made no difference to me whether the clothes were put away in the closet or strewn about the floor. I scoffed at people who hired professional organizers and laugh at anyone crazy enough to pay the ridiculous prices for California Closets (admittedly, I still do think their prices are outrageous for a product that is a relatively simple DIY project.)

For a while, my husband and I were paying someone to clean our house. Once a week we would come home to a nearly spotless home. Anything that had been laying around was put away and it did make a huge difference. There was a sense of calm walking into the house and knowing that it was clean and decluttered.

For financial reasons, we decided that we no longer wanted to pay a cleaning service to tidy up after us. That left my husband and I with a long list of cleaning chores every weekend, most of which never were accomplished.

I started getting up early and taking on one task every morning. Vacuuming was the only thing that was reserved for weekends because I didn’t want to wake up our toddler.

In the transition from being unbothered by clutter to a healthy appreciation of a clean and ordered house, I learned a few things along the way:

Don’t refuse to clean something up just because the mess isn’t your “fault”

I started off this way – leaving dirty dishes in the sink because they weren’t mind. However, I found that when I started cleaning up everything in the kitchen, my husband was much more likely to put his dishes away so as to not ruin the clean kitchen. Everyone won.

Start small.

Some mornings all that would get done is a cursory cleanup of our bathroom. Though I might have loftier goals, every little bit makes a difference and leaves less to do later.

Constantly be cleaning and decluttering.

One of my goals was that the kitchen and bathroom counters would be clutter-free. Anytime I walk through the kitchen or bathroom, I put away whatever is sitting out. Now, ideally, things wouldn’t have been left out in the first place, but this goes back to the first point – don’t assign blame, just clean it up.

Be ruthless when getting rid of things you don’t use or need.

I find this one to be especially hard when it comes to clothing. I’m scared to get rid of items that are the wrong size, because you just never know when you’ll put (or lose) a pound or two. Then there are the items with large sentimental values (the Hawaiian shirt I wore to my high school graduation is a prime example, especially considering I’ve sworn never to wear that awful shirt in public again) that tend to survive every attempt at purging.

I find that it’s easiest to get rid of things in one fell swoop. If I try to get rid of a few items at a time I may have too much time to reconsider. But try to find things a new home – Goodwill, craigslist, acquaintances that might find things to be of good use.

Remember the sense of calm that comes with declutter and cleaning.

Really, I never thought that I’d be one to say this, but having things put away really does make a huge difference in your mental state.