Decluttering vs Organizing

Tidying up the living room floor after three kids have gone to bed is no fun, and as much as we try to involve them in the process, I inevitably find myself picking up extra pieces of Lego, Duplo, Playmobil, Brio, and random plastic toys from birthday goody bags, and more. The exasperation this brings stands in stark contrast to the joy I feel when getting rid of toys the kids have outgrown (by donating them to the school's Christmas fair or the Salvation Army). Because once you've decluttered something, you never have to tidy it up again, whereas tidying and organizing never stop.

The same applies everywhere in life and business:

• Axe an unloved product feature, and the maintenance burden of that feature is gone forever. No amount of clever organizing of the code gets you this much productivity.

• Declutter your meetings. No amount of time management gives you as much free time as cancelling an unproductive standing meeting for good!

• Limit your ongoing initiatives to the point where organizing them is trivial: Having too many things on the go in parallel is the managerial equivalent of having an overflowing junk drawer.

Decluttering beats organizing, because organizing is temporary, but decluttering is forever.