Professional Organizers make a career of helping people get organized. They recommend that for every new item you bring into your home or office, you remove an old item.  This makes complete sense and I recommend that you adopt this rule. You avoid collecting clutter with this process.

If you have accumulated a lot of clutter, there’s no time like the present to purge and get organized and gain greater control over your workday. If you tackle a pile a day or one drawer a day during time dedicated to this task alone, you’ll be back on track in no time. Taking it on in small bites makes it a manageable task and easy to maintain. For example if you set aside an hour a day or every other day, you will be making progress and still have time for your revenue generating tasks.

This ‘Out With The Old, In With The New’ rule is also relevant to our ways of doing things in our businesses. Consider your approach this past year. Did the methods you used help you to achieve your goals? If not, it’s time to ditch your old methods, get organized and try something new.

Here are a few points to ponder as you prepare for the new year and contemplate your goals:

• If you were always trying to do too much in a flurry of activity, try doing less and doing it better. The time you spend will be more focused and count for more.
• If you had a lot of goals and didn’t achieve them all, only have one achievable but challenging goal at a time this year. One main focus increases your chances of achieving the goal.
• Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades, master of none? If you had many new skills you tried to learn but only skimmed the surface of a few of them, try picking the one most essential new skill to your business and learn it well before moving on to the next. It is not possible to be proficient at everything but it is to your advantage to have a couple of key areas of expertise. Surround yourself with those that are specialists in other areas and work with each other.

In those areas of your business that didn’t quite go as planned, try doing things a little differently this year for better results.

“Success is not for the chosen few; success is for the few that choose it.” -Gary Keller