How Does Clutter Destroy Progress?
It eats up your valuable resources and commodities. It makes you irritable and if it's real bad, makes you very anxious and nervous. It is unhealthy and it absolutely KILLS success!
I know from experience! It is not something I learned from my mother.
How many times have you tried to sift through mountains of papers trying to find that single 8.5x11 document...the only one if its kind...even comes with a coffee stain for easy identification...but minutes, even hours later, you have still not found it.
Or, you lost the key to your vehicle because something sifted and covered it up. It made you late to your important meeting.
Drat it! Have you ever gotten to the point where you had to use utmost care when moving around so that your hands or any other part of your body comes into contact with the piles of stuff and upset a pile and it comes tumbling down? How irritating and frustrating! It will make your nerves as tight as a snare drum!
My living quarters are very small. Even now, I have too much stuff in here. Given my situation, I simply can't have it in here, so I've been moving it out. It's getting there.
The Notorious Hard Drive
If it's a computer file...that is, a text, database document, image, whatever...and you don't know its name...good luck finding it amongst a half a million other files, some of which are inadequately-named or not where they belongs on the hard drive.
After awhile, you give up and try to secure another copy of the document from original sources. Now what was that website? Can't find the right keywords to find it? It was too far back in your online history, but you try to find it to no avail and many more minutes lost. You can't find it because you don't know where or how you got to the page previously. Eventually you may...or may not ever find that file! Meanwhile, you've eaten considerable time trying to find it.
A week has passed...
You sift through the clutter looking for some other document for a new project you're beginning!
In so doing, you find the one you were looking for the week before...for the other project. So you turn your attention to that. Albeit, now you've spend even more time switching to the other project, now you must re-orient yourself to what you're shifting gears to.
You've not planned this. In fact, you've not planned anything. It's all up in the air and anywhere the wind goes... Yes, this can happen in our online campaigns as well! Planning is very important and I will get to that in another training module. For now, let's work on removing some of the irons you have in the fire. This is a great place to start. Planning becomes much easier after you do this...
Here are some ways you can tame your projects and get more done with less! Less of a mess, that is!