How Did Clutter Crash My Business?
My own story of disorganization, untidiness, and frustration that destroyed my startup!
Bored from my routine job, I got excited to start out freelancing. I signed up Odesk (now Upwork), created my job profile and got down bidding on the jobs.
After struggling for a week, I finally had my first writing job –a 1000 words long blog article. I rushed to create a word file on my desktop and began surfing websites to collect information on the given topic. I created another word file to stack some blog writing tips.
Out of excitement, I submitted my first ever project, blog article to the buyer. Say it my luck or effort, soon I won a few more projects. This time, I created a folder in D drive and began throwing files there — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, costings, pictures, PDFs, and whatever I created during the projects.
A couple of months past, my freelancing work was scaling.
As my online venture headed, I got badly stuck in handling several projects at a time, responding to untimely texts of the customers, making heck of changes and struggling to secure new projects. Sometimes I got assignments I didn’t have any experience— for which I had to do intensive research.
Messed Up Organization
By now, all my desktop was messed up with files and drive D was having no better look. The further chunk of movies, pictures, software, and other loosely organized stuff had already made my computer pathetic. The speed of my computer was already bad.
Initially, this mess didn’t trouble me because I was doing a few easy to handle projects. But as soon as my work grew, the number of files on my computer increased exponentially. Ambitious to mint money, my whole focus was on doing the projects, not on organizing things.
Effects Began Appearing
Things became happening that I didn’t realize that time. More of my time was being spent on tracing and retrieving the files and less on the productive work. At one instant my windows got corrupted due to which I lost all my previous work and at another instant, I mistakenly shift delete a useful folder due which I had to rework wasting many days. Moreover, my email account was getting full of many junk and useless emails.
I started to become frustrated — but I never knew it.
I also couldn’t take care of security issues. My email and bank account got hacked due to my own negligence and I lost money.
I was also making many mistakes in my work which displeased my customers and lost some projects. But still I was able to pace up.
I Couldn’t Grow It!
More mess was created when I had to hire a team to sublet the work. Now managing dozens of files, allocating the right work to the right person, training him for the job, and keeping the economics got coupled with my existing problems.
I didn’t have a clear business plan, no cost works, no proper communication with team members — only what was in me was a strong ambition to grab an inspiring success. This ambition diverting me from doing reorganization, to rethink the way I am doing things, and relocate myself.
A time came when I was completely broken and so decided to quit.
I was doing projects, moving fast, and earning money- and despite that I quit.
I knew that I can’t do it more but never knew the real reasons.
What did I learn?
Cause of failure you don’t know immediately. The reason of my failure was solely clutter. Clutter don’t harm you when you have few projects, but when your projects grow in number and complexity bad organization badly fails you.
I learned many lessons of organizations from my failure. Below are some of the suggestions for you:
1. Separate Folder: Always create a separate folder for your project, and give it a proper name. You can make its shortcut on the desktop for quick access.
2. Limit Number: Never create more than 7 sub-folders. Human memory has a limitation of seven (plus-minus 2). With less than 7, you can work effectively.
3. Naming Technique: Use any project management technique to name folders. I usually name my folders like this: 1-Business Plan 2-Research, 3-Development, 5- Operations 5- Marketing 6- Finance.
4. Don’t Clutter Desktop: Don’t create files on your desktop — first create its right location in a drive and then start working on it. Before saving any file think out its right location in your scheme of folders. Sometimes for sake of hurry, we create temporary files on the desktop, and then soon it gets filled up with many.
5. Choose Relevant Names for Files and Folders: Don’t randomly assign a name to your folder or file. Give it a proper name that relates to its purpose or nature. Suppose you have created some content for your website’s homepage, then you should name the folder like this “Website Name” Homepage Content.
6. Avoid Storing Readily Available Content: Don’t store files, software, or books that are readily available on the internet — you need to keep backing up your important files (preferable that you created yourself), where large sizes will waste time and fill up space.
7. Weekend for Reorganization: Every Sunday, reorganize your stuff, folders, files, etc.
8. Format Your Excel: If you create an excel sheet, give it a proper title, use proper names in headers, format rows and columns, and use colors. It will take some time but you won’t face trouble later.
9. MS PowerPoint for Research: Use MS PowerPoint when you are doing research on something, collecting basic information, or thinking about the design of something.
10. Mind Mapping Tool: Use mind mapping tools to organize your whole structure of work. At least before starting any project create its mind map.
11. Keep Deleting Useless Stuff: Keep deleting unnecessary files, re-categorize and rename your folders and sub-folders, and remove irrelevant content from your Word, PowerPoint, and excel sheets. Delete those applications that you are no more using and unsubscribe the emails that you don’t read. Use a separate email to sign up websites about which you are unsure of their authenticity and security.
Concluding Notes:
The crux is you should do your tasks and organization in parallel. Organize before starting the work, during the work and after the work.
