When it comes to running your own business, you can never be too organized. In fact, de-cluttering, having everything together, and organizing yourself, including your company’s finances, can help you feel more positive, energized, and effective when you approach your work.
While nobody is perfect and you will never have your company’s finances and its overall obligations completely squared away, it doesn’t heart to perform a little TLC every now and then. In fact, it can be argued that it is actually somewhat unhealthy to be too organized.
Think about it—the world didn’t evolve out of a mess.
The KonMari Method
Marie “KonMari” Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up has become a worldwide phenomenon. Although the book itself is aimed more towards personal organization—for example, the organization of your home’s closet—it can easily be applied to business.
Running a business is no easy feat and, as we have mentioned, staying organized can be difficult. It is an important thing to do, though. Every now and then, you need to take a step back and think about how you can make organizational improvements and get everything in ship shape.
There are plenty of words of wisdom and tenets in her book, however, the three below can be directly applied to business and used to help achieve long-term success.
3 KonMari Tenets You Can Use
1. Do the easiest things first
For Marie Kondo, sorting out her clothes is a lot easier than sorting through the photos on her phone. This is because photos carry a lot more weight and emotional baggage. Her advice, therefore, is to not begin your spring cleaning by diving into your boxes full of old photographs or scrolling through your camera roll.
Instead, focus first on what’s easier and carries less weight. Don’t worry about designing a process that is perfect or think about what you should be doing first. Instead, just go for it.
2. Give up things to make room for what truly matters
Again, much of the KonMari method relates to clothes and the closet. This tenant says that you should try to “visualize a clutter-free space”. This KonMari method isn’t just talking about a clutter-free closet, though; it is talking about a clutter-free life and what this means to you on a deeper and more intimate level.
When you are de-cluttered and have given up things that are less important, you have more time to focus on what matters more to your business—taking clients out for lunches, reading up on the latest industry mood, or simply having five minutes to show your employees that they are valued can all be done easier when you apply KonMari.
3. If you cannot see it, you cannot use it
Each year, Marie Kondo puts her sweaters and jackets away when the summer months start rolling in. By doing this, she says, it creates far greater clarity and focus about what is most important to her and when.
Applying this to business, think about your most valuable assets—people. Do these ever go unutilized or underutilized? Yes, of course they do! At the same time, people are your company’s most expensive and most important asset. If you are not seeing your employees and are not taking time out to engage with them, you are not going to be using them to the full extent you could.
When we apply the KonMari tenant of “if you cannot see it, you cannot use it” to business, it says you should take time out of your day to see and truly get to know your employees. Find out how they are, how they feel, how their work is going, and what they think can be done to make improvements to their job or the organization.
By giving employees the opportunity to make a difference with KonMari, you will extract far more value out of them which, in the long-term, helps grow your company.
