Are You Building Your Business with Clarity or Clutter?

Have you ever been so passionate about your business, so in love with your business that you’ve stayed up late, maybe most of the night to work on an upcoming project? Have you gotten up early because the spark of an idea woke you up without the need of an alarm clock? What I am describing is the love you have for your business and living a life of choice. Most of all our choices are based on creating a lifestyle of joy and freedom. But what happens when late nights shift to overwhelm, bright shiny objects get in the way and productivity turns into clutter?

Can you remember a time when you were unfocused for a day, a week or even a year and then looked around at your surroundings and your life and noticed that it was just as cluttered and unorganized as your thoughts? Likewise, have you noticed how much clarity you have when everything is in order? In those moments when everything is in place it reflects perfect harmony. So while we are eliminating clutter this week, remember that our life and our business is the exact mental equivalent of our thoughts. Are you building your business with clarity or clutter?

I would love to say that removing clutter is a one step process where we just schedule a day to sort everything out and congratulate ourselves for a job well done. I’ve done that before. Cleaned the garage without considering how it got that way. And guess what the stuff accumulated again. To shift into alignment use the 5 Steps to Aligning Your Life then step right into action.

To remove the clutter remember you are not only removing the clutter you are making a space for more creativity, more clients, more money and more freedom.

So let’s start with your workspace. If you created it some time ago and it no longer feels comfortable, here are some questions you may want to ask yourself.

* Is it time for a change? Does it feel too corporate?
* Do you feel stifled or limited when you enter the office?
* Is there too much furniture?
* Are there stacks of paper every where? On your desk, on the floor, on a table…

If any of these are true for you these are easy fixes. About five years ago, feeling limited and closed in wood furniture, I switched to glass furniture and it immediately created a flow and the room feels bigger as well. I am drawn to the ocean so the office is now a beautiful ocean mist color instead of a dark green. Changing the filing system and adding candles and different pictures not only helped to reduce the clutter it created a space where I can connect with source and be productive.

Another area that you should look at is your computer. Other than a journal your computer is a place where you create and process most of your thoughts. I recommend starting with three areas, your desktop, your inbox and your documents.

A cluttered desktop can distract you before you even begin. Sort through your icons and eliminate the ones you no longer use from your desktop or even from your computer. You can then group like programs into folders and then sort them so that they are easy for you to find.

Your inbox. A few weeks ago, I experienced inbox overflow that had me almost pulling my hair out. I nearly had my inbox down to a manageable amount and the server started downloading all of the saved messages into my inbox. Imagine over 4000 emails flowing into your box at one time twice! Email organizing is a must. If you allow it to be overwhelming you may avoid it all together and miss some very important emails.

There are three things that you can do immediately.

* First, read, delete or sort email as soon as you receive it or set up rules within Outlook to do it for you.
* Second, check your subscriptions and see if there any you no longer read that are just sitting in your ‘read later’ folder and consider unsubscribing for now you can always subscribe again later if you find the need.
* The third thing you can do is to read this week’s article by Outlook Expert, Mary Scott on how to streamline Outlook and save time.

Another area where clutter can slow you down is finding documents that you saved a month ago and are now trying to locate it is taking you so long that you almost rather recreate it.

* You may want to set up folders and subfolders for each project or client you work with.
* Create one that contains documents you are currently working on, one that contains old revisions that you don’t use, but need to keep, and one that contains documents that you use regularly.
* If you are using Windows 2007, you may want to pin important documents to your Office Button so you can easily find them.

So your assignment this week is to look around and see if there are any areas where you have accumulated ‘stuff’, align yourself, remove the clutter and enjoy the freedom.