By Leo Babauta

Last week, I spent two days doing some productivity housekeeping.

What the heck is that? It’s liberating and wonderful, that’s what.

Imagine your house was messy (hard to picture, I know), because you kept putting off little things like putting away your clothes, washing your dishes, throwing things away, putting things where they belong, sorting through your mail. You’re too busy.

Then imagine you took a day to clean everything, put everything where it belonged. Your house is immaculate, and you’re incredibly relieved, because it was all weighing on you mentally.

That’s what I did for my work tasks. I cleaned house.

I took care of all the little things I’d been putting off because I’d been focused on more important tasks.

Some of the things I cleared off my plate:

• Little website maintenance tasks
• Emails that had been sitting unanswered (yep, cleared my inbox)
• A bunch of papers that I needed to scan
• Tax documents that I needed to act on
• Things I’d needed to mail
• Payments I’d needed to send
• A few customers with thorny problems
• Decisions I’d been putting off
• Installed some plugins on one of my sites and configured them
• Hired an executive assistant, created a bunch of procedures for her
• Had some things repaired
• Fixed a couple things with my bank accounts and credit cards
• Wrote a couple articles I’d been putting off

There were more, but you get the idea.

You can’t imagine how amazing it felt to be clear of all these things.

Now, I still advocate putting the important things first. Don’t put them off by focusing on the small things. But the small things add up to big things. They weigh on you, become a burden.

And so I now plan on doing regular housekeeping once a week, rather than waiting a month or two on small tasks as I’d been doing.

Clean your house. You’ll love it.