The Joy of Shredding

Charlene and I have been working on business planning for the last month. new budgets, written core values, the creation of rules that governs the culture of our business are just a few of the things we are doing to insure 2012 will be even better. At the same time I am in the holiday spirit, and as the keeper of all the old family photographs I am categorizing them to get to a digitizer for a more permanent home to distribute to family members. Sometimes looking over the times of your life especially before your 64th birthday causes a few pangs of regret, bur during my search of the attic my attitude changed because of what I found.

In my search I found that I had saved boxes of old records, bank statements, and in the pre-online era, the checks them selves dating back to 1998. Knowing that many of these papers I don't have to keep anymore for the IRS so I set out to dispose of them, but these records you don't want to put whole in the garbage can, so I took them to The Shredder. Yes I put that in bold because I found the antidote to old painful memories and regrets, shredding!

I am like many of you, I have a hard time of letting go. When a buyers or another agent is too pushy, I get angry and have to hold myself back. When I think back to missed opportunities I want to bang my head against the wall saying how was I so blind? But holding those bank statements as they went through the shredder, not only was I emptying boxes of what I didn't need anymore, I also felt a lighter spirit inside of me, and a strange feeling started to overcome me and I had to ask myself what was this feeling? It was pleasure.

Pleasure from ridding myself of clutter, and ridding my soul of any obsession with the past. We tell our selling clients all the time, you need to declutter your home to maximize the sales potential, but are we saying this to ourselves about our own lives? I have spent a month getting ready for next year by making plans, creating flow charts, making my marketing have synergy, leveraging repeatable task for outsource, and making projections based on big dreams. That is all good stuff to do, but like a computer hard drive that is full to capacity, it just doesn't work as well. While you are preparing for the new year, think not only about what to do and how to do it, also give importance to what baggage you need to discard, both personally and professionally. For me I think like Hercules, it was his task to clean out the Augean Stables, not to put more crap into it.

FYI, my favorite tech object of this year is my industrial strength shredder, it not only shreds useless old data, it reminds me that when I wake up in the morning the past is prologue, and the future is now.