There comes a time (hopefully a few times, actually), when we have to clean things up.
Over the last few months, with the holidays in particular, we’ve amassed quite a bunch of stuff. Some of it we just haven’t gotten around to putting away; in other cases, we have just been a bit too preoccupied to remove what needs to be removed.
So, this morning, we did some cleaning up (in fairness, my wife did most of it as she tends to tell me I just make the mess worse :) ). We moved a bunch of items we want to keep into the basement for storage purposes and threw a lot of stuff out.
A lot.
In both our professional and personal lives, we need to recycle things. Sometimes that means completely severing ties, or making a big change. On other occasions, it requires us to repurpose items; to discover new uses for resources in ways that we hadn’t thought of previously.
None of this is easy. And, depending on how those in our lives take it, it can be incredibly life-altering for us, and those we serve. But the other option, continuing on, or letting less than ideal clutter make things harder, is never in anyone’s best interest.
How often do we need to clean? We can use either a time-based model (for instance, reviewing resources every semester or every year), or we can use an event-based system (for instance, predicting large changes in enrollment, or wanting to provide a greater range of offerings in what we provide to students). Regardless, the important goal is to make sure that we use some sort of model to prevent cleaning up from happening because we literally can’t deal with the way things are. Therefore, cleaning up regularly isn’t just an option, it’s a necessity.
Keeping our work and personal lives clean is something we all must strive for. Clutter never cleans itself.