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I bring this up because summer is the best time to work on big projects and planning initiatives. Client demands are lower and your team should be recharged from recent vacations and less round the clock stress.
Marie Kondo, (aka “Konmari”), is a Japanese organizing consultant, author and TV show host. Her KonMari Method for organizing is based on tidying by category — not by location — beginning with clothes, then moving on to books, papers, komono (miscellaneous items), and, finally, to sentimental items. The key to making Konmari work is to eliminate everything that doesn’t bring you joy—she means everything!
Kondo is a big advocate of making a clean sweep — cleaning up your whole house all at once. By contrast, Fumio Sasaki,author of
Many of us have team/office goals we want to accomplish before the next busy season. Sometimes, these are the same goals we’ve had from the last year because we didn’t get it done in 2020.
As with many things in life, big goals can be daunting. So, there’s a tendency to procrastinate. June rolls into July. August rolls into September. Before you know it, deadlines creep up on you and before you know it, it’s back to the busy season hamster wheel without any progress being made.
Don’t let this happen to you again.
Kondo’s “Tidying Up” show is immensely popular, even though only a small fraction of the audience actually implements her teachings. It’s aspirational, like the home makeover shows. It’s hard to eat an elephant all at once. But anyone can put the Sasaki method into practice because it lets you eat the elephant one bit at a time and go at your own pace.
To get started, just ask yourself, “What am I going to do today to get just a little bit better? What am I going to do tomorrow?” The steps should be small enough so that you can accomplish one every day and empower yourself to keep moving way closer to your goal. Isn’t that better than looking wistfully at a picture of your ideal scenario way off in the future?
I know change is hard. There’s always an excuse for not getting started. But can you really afford to let another year go by without making the changes you know you have to make?
It’s just a matter of deciding which method to use:
1. Kondo (all at once);
2. Sasaki (incremental steps).
Next steps
The week after you get back from vacation (or before you even leave), write down your big goal. Then go to your calendar and spend 30 minutes writing down specifically what you’re going to do each day and each week to reach that goal. Again, you only need to spend 30 to 60 minutes per day on that project. The key is to be consistent. If you can build some good momentum during your first week back, the rest is likely to take care of itself.
Again, write down exactly what you are going to do for 30 to 60 minutes per day to knock out one of those big projects. Examples:
- Adopting a new client portal;
- New client onboarding process;
- Move your best clients to fixed-fee billing;
- A new service offering for your firm.
Why do people get bogged down during planning season?
Like New Year’s resolutions, we tend to get too ambitious for ourselves during summer planning season. We try to clean up the entire house all at once, rather than going through one room at a time or even one drawer at a time. Also, these big projects aren’t urgent for the firm. They’re big picture. There aren’t forms to follow or actionable next steps to take. So, it’s hard to know how and when to take the first step. Even firms with the best of intentions find themselves trying to get a team member onboarded, or a client issue pops up, or someone is on vacation, or you have a technology issue, etc.
Sound familiar?
Inevitably, you and your team get disappointed with the lack of progress, and you start asking yourself: “What am I going to do next?”
Sasaki himself tells readers, “Discard something right now! Don’t wait till you have finished this book. The best way to go about it is to hone your skills as your part with your possessions. Close the book this moment and discard something. This is the first step,” Sasaki continues.
He said it could be something as simple as throwing out an old dried out marker or expired business cards or too-short pencils or a pile of magazines you know you’ll never read. Maybe it’s a mess of tangled up charging cables you stashed away “just in case you need them” but know you never will.
Once you get started, Sasaki says you may want to do 10 more minutes discarding things and then 10 more because it’s so liberating.
Action item
Before you dash out the door for vacation, ask everyone on your team to write down one thing they’re going to do for 30 to 60 minutes each day when they return that will help move your firm toward a big picture goal. By the way, there’s no wrong answer to your goal. You’ve probably had it on your wish list for months, if not years. The reason you haven’t made progress is not because you’re lazy or disorganized. You just haven’t tried the Sasaki method — what small step can I take today that’s going to get me closer.
For more about making continuous improvement — i.e., getting 1% better every day — see my article
There’s nothing sexy or exciting about taking one small step at a time. That doesn’t make for great television like Marie Kondo’s dramatic organizing “makeover” show. But one small step at a time is how you get things done. What one small thing can every person at your firm do to move you closer to your goal?
