If you've spent much time reading books or sites about simplicity or frugality, you're probably familiar with the importance of taking good care of the stuff you currently have. It's a spectacularly simple concept, but it has a powerful payoff in terms of time, energy and money saved.
Peter Walsh, the home organizer extraordinaire of TLC's Clean Sweep would regularly ask homeowners if they were respecting the items in their homes (usually when the homeowner would protest the discarding of a dilapidated, dusty or otherwise grungy item). In businesses, respecting your stuff is usually less emotional, but it can have just as much of a benefit as honoring your treasured home possessions.
Take the humble printer. Admittedly, printer prices have fallen considerably in the past 10 years or so, but it still makes a lot more sense to check your toner levels, keep extra cartridges on hand, run the "self-clean" program and clean the drum as recommended by the manufacturer than to buy a new printer and not take care of it. Besides, it's a scientific fact that printers are never more likely to fail than when you're printing something crucial on a tight deadline.
All that maintenance sounds like a lot of work, though, doesn't it. Especially for a piece of equipment that probably annoys you on a semiregular basis (studies report that about 50% of printer owners are dissatisfied with their machine). What a pain to have to take care of something like that!
And that, as you've probably grown tired of me saying, is where gratitude comes in. If you can take a step back and realize how fortunate we are to be living in a time when printing technology is affordable for so many of us and what a positive difference having that printer makes in your business, perhaps taking the 10 minutes a month to run the checks and programs might not seem like such an onerous task.
That perspective can apply to the rest of the items that help your business run: your computer (back up your data, people!), your email (clean it out), your office furniture, the items you use in your business, the car you drive to appointments, even your office supplies. Taking care of your possessions is a way of showing respect and gratitude, and it calls to mind the classic maxim: "You take care of them, they'll take care of you."
What about you? What stuff around your office have you let fall into disrepair, and how could you change the way you look at it to make its maintenance more appealing? Let me know in the comments!
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