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.