Spring is upon us and for a lot of us we take terms literally and choose right around now to engage in a good old fashioned spring clean at home. It can be very refreshing, you hold on to the things that have value to you while making room for new things.
Alternatively you pick this time of year to reorganise aspects of your life, whether that be at home or in a professional capacity.
Office Spring Cleaning Tips.
You spend more time at the office than you do with your loved ones, on average we spend 40 hours per week at work and the environment in which you work in can have a huge impact on your mood and productivity levels.
With that in mind, here are some helpful tips to clean up important processes in your business.
Update Social Media
Office Spring Cleaning Tips.
Social media is perhaps the fastest growing aspect of your business and therefore requires a lot of preservation. Trends change quickly so it’s important to make sure everything from your your bio through to your actual content is still relevant. While there are some significant steps you can take to clean out your social media presence, some easy first steps could be to:
Update Copy
Does your bio reflect what you do? Are your images, headlines and copy telling your audience as much about your business as they should? Is your content written in a way that still resonates with your ideal client?
Clear out old posts
Taylor swift wiped all her social media channels in 2017 for a big marketing ploy to promote her then forthcoming “Reputation” album. She deleted all her posts but kept her social accounts and then repopulated her account with her now-infamous snake iconography.
While you might not need to go to this extreme, a little maintenance on posts that don’t align with your objectives, aesthetics or current offers can be edited, updated or even deleted.
Unfollow train
Sometimes, you need to take a good long hard look at yourself and ask: “Do I really need to be following ALL of the Beckham family or every design agency in the world?”
Maybe you do, and that’s totally up to you. Even if Brooklyn Beckham makes the cut, there are dozens of other pages that don’t need to be taking up precious space on your feed.
Clean up Emails
There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to find an email to refer to and having to trawl through an inbox full of unread messages. That’s why its important to stay on top of your emails and organise them according to their necessity. Clear out old emails, we would suggest archiving anything older than 6 months unless its important of course! Take the time to unsubscribe from those annoying newsletters you never actually read.
It goes back to that idea that when you take the time to refresh, it can give your motivation a little kick start.
Back up your business
Take it from someone who’s hard drive died! Having duplicate copies of your most important information saved in a remote location keeps it safe in case anything goes badly wrong with your computer. There are a number of ways files can be lost unexpectedly…
If you’re storing your files on a hard drive, make sure you take the time to back those files up or move them onto the Cloud if you can. Hard drives can crash or die at any time and all your valuable data can be gone in a second. We use Google Drive to store a lot of our documents, its easily accessible and we can upload and download files regardless of our location.
Explore Automation
One of the best things you can do to speed up and fine tune your processes is to use automation. Making use of automation systems can be a game changer for your business. You may have to spend a bit of money in order to use them but in the long run the investment will save you money.
Utilise a service like MailChimp instead of sending untidy and bulk messages through Outlook or Gmail.
Use an online project management system such as Asana or Trello and collaborate with your team online instead of spending hours writing things out on a whiteboard.
Hop on Canva and create some fresh, modern graphics for your business.
Assess time management
We have so many routines and demands each day so ask yourself, what does your time management look like? Are you utilising your time wisely or struggling to be productive more often than not?
Spring is a great time to implement some new schedules or cut back on existing commitments.
Re-assess your goals and objectives
Prioritise wisely
Plan ahead.
Eliminate distractions.
Delegate more often.
Watch what you spend.
Most importantly take care of yourself.
Literally Clean
Nothing we’ve mentioned so far replaces the importance of rolling up your sleeves and doing the real cleaning. Whether it’s your workspace or the tools themselves, cleaning them is a simple way to kick off or round out your spring clean.
Computer
So you gave your screen and keyboard a good wipe down, all done, right? Don’t stop there! Similar to your social media and email, your computer is probably filled with files and downloads you never think about. This build-up could cause your device to work slower, as well as put you in a bind once you start running low on storage.
Office
Cleaning the physical space we work in. We might not have the power to create our perfect workspace, but we do have the power to keep that space clean, organised and functional.
Office Spring Cleaning Tips.
Sometimes we are resistant to change because we are so attached to a process that keeps everything “perfect.” Whether it’s wall decor, the position of your workspace, or a new desk buddy. Change is good. Having your entire business process in one, easy to access, streamlined and organised place can, in the long run, save you money, time and stress.
