3. Clean up behind you (as you go)

This article is a part of the 12 lessons from the kitchen table series.

Cooking shows might be inspiring, but they hardly show you the full picture, just like an Instagram post. The most important thing no one tells you about cooking is that it's a messy business. You don't start with a nicely laid out platter of ingredients and spices like a cooking show; you start with nothing. 

As you assemble these ingredients, chop them, mix them, grind them, you leave behind a trail of spills, drips, leaks, and splashes. Soon you have those jars and bottles from the top shelves on the table with all the pans and spatulas and everything else you need to cook. By the time you are done, the kitchen is so dirty that it takes another hour to clean up and drains any motivation to come back and cook again.

A hard-learned lesson both at the workplace and on the kitchen table, the longer a mess is left around, the harder it is to clean. Here are some examples of similar workplace cleans ups that never happen :

1. Project documentation that gets stale 
2. Timeline trackers that never get updated 
3. Goals set at the starting of the year never revisited till the end
4. Risks and vulnerabilities found but never revisited 

There is a trail of similar spills, drips, leaks, and splashes that every team, manager, and employee leaves behind every single day. They soon pile up and reach a point where cleaning them up is too cumbersome, and it's much easier to ignore them. Leaving such messes around and ignoring them doesn't just set the wrong precedence but also prevents a team from reaching its full potential. These messes demotivate high performers and hinder the learning process of new members on the team.

One of the best strategies to avoid such a pile-up is allotting 10% - 20% of the team's time to clean up such messes and continually making progress. Remember, just like you come back and cook the next day in your kitchen, you also come back and build on your work each day, so clean up behind you as you go.