Cleaning Is Part Of The Job #

Any work you will disorganize the things around you. You might end up with crayons out of their boxes, files all over your desk, so many tabs than only the closing button is visible, code comments that explain nothing, functions that nobody uses, too many hidden layers in a design file. The list could go on and on but you get the point.

Imagine a chef coming into work in the morning, after a large guests dinner party, and having to clean after the mess of the last night instead of being able to start preparing and cooking for the lunch hours. Well, something similar happens to all of us when we don’t care of cleaning the mess we leave behind be it digital or physical. We are not only shown down by the mess but actually blocked by it.

Cleaning is not only about our mess, but also about all the mess in our workspace. If you see a piece of code that could be cleaned up, power tools with dirt on it, empty coffee cups in the meeting room… are you going to leave that there or are you going to clean it and thus improving your environment?

Yes, constantly cleaning is a tedious process in the moment but a very easy one to do and the benefits are enormous because it becomes self sustaining. If someone sees you taking care of the little details, they will also start taking care of the little details. If you go into a new place that is clean you will bend yourself over in order to keep it at least as clean as you found it. The same in the opposite direction, you will not take the same care of a disorganised place.

This is not to say that from time to time an in-depth cleaning is not required. It’s inevitable that things will get into hard to get places. You might need to move half the furniture in your office in order to clean one spot or you might need to refactor an entire module in order to bring it back to a clean state. The question is not about the need of one time efforts or not but how bad the shape of your environment will be when the time comes.

Cleaning activities might vary from field to field; like writing that status update, the grocery list for tomorrow, organize your files in folders and stacks, making sure your devices are recharging…

The tomorrow you has better things to do than clean after today you.