Spring cleaning your professional life

Part I: actual, physical cleaning of your spaces

Part II: cleaning in a broader sense (networking, contacts, resume)

As someone who admittedly loves the KonMari method (four years strong!) and the trendiness of it due to the Netflix series (does this spark joy?), I decided to spend some time thinking about how I could spring clean a few things professionally. I remember advocating for and successfully implementing an all-department cleaning day at DSHA High School, which a) became a tradition and b) completely changed the juju of the advancement department. Why? I like to think that we can all benefit from a little bit of decluttering, gaining clarity and energy along the way. That sets us up for renewal in the workplace.

Let’s get started:

1.      Designate a day. Yes. At least one day that’s dedicated to the task of physically cleaning. If you’re able to, get the whole department on board, keep the day entirely meeting-free, allow coworkers to wear jeans, and make a day of it. Heck, order some pizza.

2.      Always have Spotify playing.

3.      Consider asking your shredding company to bring additional bins. Talk to the maintenance staff and ask for cleaning supplies, garbage bins, etc.

4.      Open the windows, office and weather permitting.

The physical cleaning:

5.      Start with your immediate office/location and then expand to common areas. Take things off of your desk and windowsills, dust and wipe down, go through all of your bookcases and filing cabinets. Do you need that check stub from 1996? I didn’t think so.

6.      Use bleach wipes on your desk phone. Often. So gross.

7.      While you have the bleach wipes out, clean off your keyboard and mouse, too. *shudder*

8.      Vacuum. Rip the band-aid off and do it.

9.      Recycle. Toss. Come on, do it. You don’t need that packet of soy sauce, the dusty toothbrush, the filled notebook, the book on entrepreneurial spirit that you never read, the free tchotchke from a conference two years ago. Unless it is a critical company file (and you will know the difference between the final draft and the 24 drafts that got you there), let it go.

Take stock:

10.  Is it time to rearrange your office? Think about the furniture, but also consider where you put your items and how you organize them. Remember that feeling you got as a kid after rearranging your bedroom? You’ll get that again, I promise.

11.  Now that you’re all recombobulated (thank you, Milwaukee General Mitchell Airport), what’s missing? Do you need bookends? Tissue boxes? How’s your pen supply? Is it time to hang some personal artifacts up? Listen, you spend 8+ hours in your working space every day. Take the time to make it feel great. Upgrade your wall calendar to something other than the free one that you got from your local printer.

12.  Sit down. Look around. How does it feel? Any adjustments needed?

Computer time:

13.  When is the last time you thought about your electronic file organization? Email organization? Take the time needed to save important files, name them so that they’re easy to find, delete the email that the file was originally sent in. If you save emails to folders, when is the last time you went through those folders to see what can be purged? Why are you keeping that “reply-all, thanks!” email? Spend a week or so unsubscribing from emails that no longer serve you and you'll see just how much less clutter there is in your inbox.

14.  Are you using your “sent items” and “deleted items” as a storage folder? Don’t. Just don’t. Ask your IT person about ways to archive and/or tips for file storage. They will love you.

15.  Click on your internet browser and do the same with your bookmarks. Rename, move, delete. Purge your history every once in awhile.

16.  You know those flash drives? What’s on them? Can they be deleted or at least condensed?

17.  What about your phone? Face it, we spend a lot of time looking at our smartphones during the day, too. Decide which apps might be able to be deleted and organize the ones that are left. I randomly decided to organize my apps by color (a little experiment, if you will) and I still kind of love it!

18.  When are you going to go through the photos on your phone? Huh?

Networking:

19.  Say what? Deep breath, hear me out. You were in your computer files. You were in your phone. Have you ever gone through your contacts to see what needs to be updated and/or deleted? I no longer need the phone number for my mechanic in Pennsylvania, so that can go. Do you keep contacts in your Outlook? When is the last time you dug through those to correct and update? When was the last time that you exported your contacts? Take those business cards and import them.

20.  Now spend some time thinking about the monster that is LinkedIn, or really, networking in general. Is it time to send a quick hello to a former supervisor, coach, mentor, or friend? Are you following industry leaders? How can you expand your professional circle just a little bit? When I was job hunting a few years back, someone told me that I should be on LinkedIn more than I was on Facebook. Congratulate people, admire their work, find inspiration.

Professional upkeep:

21.  Time to pull out your resume. I’m not saying that you need a new job! We can all agree that updating our resumes is a pain, but it is a million times worse when you haven’t done so in years. Dust it off, jot down what you’ve done at your current company. Take a look at resume samples to see how things have changed since you last updated yours. Some are really fancy!

22.  Again, reach out to those who might someday be a reference. Not because you necessarily need them now, but because it is important to maintain some kind of relationship aside from, “Hey, Jerry! Would you be a reference?”

Jot some things down:

23.  Successful people generally spend a little bit of time every week compiling a to-do list, scheduling time for projects that have to get done, scheduling projects that give you energy, and setting aside at least a little bit of time for the major areas of your job. Social media. Marketing. Management. Professional development. Networking. Research. Schedule it and you’ll likely save some time.

24.  Even if you’re at a coffee shop and are staring at your latte art, think about what you would love to do if you had the time. That project that would stretch you and/or make you feel a little bit less like an assembly line of work. The one that always gets put on the back burner.

25.  Write an honest-to-God thank you note. Maybe it is to a coworker. The barista. The maintenance staff who takes your trash out. Who made your week a little bit “cleaner”? Thank them. 

Happy cleaning! Do you have any tips?