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Is there an assignment at work you have been avoiding? Is your desk a mess and files disorganized? Do you suffer from information overload on your computer desktop? If any of these situations correlate then your workspace is the best place to show up and deal with hard things.
Take thirty minutes to walk around your workspace and make notes of everything that requires your attention. Leave nothing out, no matter how small it is. Write the tasks down on sticky notes and tack these up on your wall. After this, the next important step is to tackle one task per day. Only one. This eliminates overwhelm, and you begin to feel less anxious and more confident.
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Key Points to Initiate the Pattern
With the following key points, you can initiate the pattern of doing hard things at work. This could be work or tasks you’re doing in your own business or an office job for a large corporation. If you work for yourself, it’s common to get stuck even more often. If you’re the only one who shows up to work every day, even the easy things can seem like obstacles.
1) Identify the reason behind your resistance. There is a reason that hard things trip us up. They are hard and we don’t want to do them. So, the mind looks for something better, more entertaining, and juicier, as an escape from reality that keeps us avoiding the hard things we need to. But resistance is persistent.
Start with the easiest thing on your hard things list. It could be an assignment you’re putting off starting it because of all the steps involved. What you can do is make a list of all the steps. Break everything down into the smallest steps possible. Then initiate your action on the first smallest step. Remember, it’s the ACTION that breaks the resistance.
2) Delegate the work you struggle with. You don’t know everything, and one area that leads to resistance is a lack of the skill that the work requires. This is why we hire accountants to do our taxes. This is why we outsource to graphic designers to create a logo for our business. And this is why we hire someone to run marketing in our company. If it were all up to you, it would never get done. This isn’t a laziness issue, but it leads to overwhelm when you try to learn skills that are not in line with your strengths.
3) Focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. Weaknesses take time to develop into strengths. It could take years, but your strength can be improved in a matter of days if the foundation is already there. Balance your strengths with the strengths of others and you have a collaborative team.
Your Digital Space
Why do you put off doing the hard thing when it comes to decluttering your digital environment? It’s easy to ignore your digital content. Nowadays, with millions more people taking to online services and business through digital platforms, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle and overwhelm of digital content.
If you ignore this task then it leads to disaster. If you spend time online and use your computer and files for business, establishing a clean, organized virtual space is essential. You will avoid burnout and brain fatigue. If you’re like most people and are spending hours a day on the computer, downloading and storing files, PDFs, videos and pictures is a normal habit that you give little thought to.
Over the years, your digital landscape can turn into a disorganized digital wasteland. You know you should organize this better, creating separate folders for your personal content, but you have so much stuff in Google Drive, Dropbox and your Desktop, the task has become daunting. This leads to overwhelm, and when you’re overwhelmed, what do you do? Put things off for a later date.
Remember, you only start doing something when you commit to it. But before you do, make your decision and ask yourself: “Is this area of my life unmanageable?” and “If I fixed it, how would this impact on my quality of living?”
Chances are, you’ll feel great knowing you are taking charge of your digital mess. By doing this, it frees up your computer and storage capacity, but the biggest advantage is, it frees up your mind.
The Advantages of Decluttering Digital Space
#1. Improves Your Focus and Productivity. These two benefits go together. You become distracted by all the junk in your folders. In your folders, it gets worse when you have multiple files. I’ve seen people with as many as 300-500 files in one folder and also people having zero space on their desktop.
When you have files upon files and data to scroll through to find what you want, it’s like swimming in a sea of confusion. You open files randomly, which leads to multitasking. When you try to decide whether you need this or that, the energy needed to decide drains your mental power. By cleaning up your digital waste, you are reducing the chances of multi-tasking and inviting overwhelm into your life.
#2. Speeds up your computer. Saving everything on your desktop slows down your computer. This reduces the life of your computer, and these devices aren’t cheap. You also have to clean your computer more often, which eats into your productivity time.
#3. Reduces capacity issues and saves money and time. Clutter takes up massive storage space which you probably have to spend more money on to increase capacity. And the more capacity you have, the more you add to it.
#4. It increases confidence. Like most things you put off in life, by tackling this massive dinosaur, you feel great by taking purposeful action towards completing such an overwhelming project. As your time and energy increase, so does your confidence and this leads to greater productivity habits. It’s all a win-win!
My Own Practice
In general, I keep my desk clean i.e. with no extra stuff. But there are documents for which we cannot decide whether to keep them or discard them on the same day. But good clarity immerses on the very next day or by the weekend. Saturday is the day for me to manage such stuff before leaving my workplace. This gives me a psychological advantage on Monday morning.
The same practice I follow for digital space management. No more than three columns on the desktop. I also keep one folder name as ‘Rough’ to park extra stuff. This is the same stuff on which we could not take the call on whether to keep it or discard it. With the above habit, it’s easy for me to manage my digital space as well.
For personal photograph storage, I follow the practice of keeping the folder name as ‘YYYYMMDD_Event Name’. This practice, I had learned from one of my friends a few years back. If you are practicing such things regularly, then it takes only a few minutes each time to manage your workplace as well as digital space effectively. (Inspired from ‘Do the Hard Things First’ by Allan Scott).
