It’s still winter, isn’t it?

I don’t know about you, but I get into some vicious melancholy around this time of year. The weather promises warmth and pulls it away. The clouds stubbornly refuse to yield ownership of the skies. Even in sunny climes there is a sense of dormancy. We bundle up our bodies and our minds, and occasionally the darkest thoughts whip through cracks in the door of our souls.

Maybe your inner voice is wondering if the client slowdown is all your fault, or the work keeps coming and you haven’t been able to take a break. Your clients are tired of the gray days and take it out on you, or you’re just marking time with the long, holiday-free stretch between Christmas-time and spring. You don’t want to clean the house because it’s just gonna get dirty. In the end you’re shuffling about like Mr. Badger, slippers down at heel, saying “I am exceedingly grumpy!”

Maybe it’s time to spring clean your brain a bit.

Let me help. Start by throwing out the negative and self-critical boxes. Put constructive criticism and to-do notes down on paper, then toss those boxes too; you can come back to them.

Take stock of your winter stores of ideas - those beautiful snippets and glorious failures, and put those right up in the front room of your mind.

Go out there and pull all the weeds in your brain that choke the goldfish pond and make the water of your creativity stagnate. Clean the filters, pour some fresh water in there. Scrub out the accumulated detritus of tired concepts and bad ideas. Compost them. As we all know, crap is useless unless it’s used as fertilizer.

In the end, you can’t do much about the weather. But you can open the drapes and let in the light, do a quick swipe with the dustrag and feel better about you, your work and your path to the future. You don’t want to spend that first glorious day of spring scrubbing the floor, right? Be ready to go out and play on that day.

If you’ve got some housecleaning tips for your business or your brain, share’em!

Ta,

TDS

Thomas (Tom) Stephan | Director of Something Clever
BoDo Author | Dyer Straits | Working Pro-bono