410 Post Halloween Purge
Sometimes the best business lessons don’t come from books — they come from kids sorting Halloween candy. A messy pile turned into a clear plan, and it’s exactly how you should treat your tasks.
0:00 Intro
0:27 Kids Smart Sorting System
0:52 Turning Chaos Into Order
01:25 Applying the Candy Lesson to Business Tasks & End-of-Year Focus
01:53 Keep: Revenue-Driving Tasks; Trade: Delegate & Automate; Toss: Unproductive Work
02:27 Business Isn’t Storage
02:55 Visibility → Clarity → Momentum
03:28 Strategizing
03:55 Final Lesson
Saturday morning after Halloween, post Halloween purge this morning, I go into what we call our FUN ROOM. A room in our house where the kids hang out a bunch. I walked in there and the kids had dumped all their candy on the floor, and there's just chaos and candy everywhere. But they were doing something really smart.
They were SORTING.
They had different piles for different categories.
They had a pile that they loved.
They had a pile of what they liked but would trade, so maybe not their favorite pile.
They had a pile that they won't eat or we won't let them eat, so that they can't eat. That's gonna get tossed or given away.
And then they were organizing it.
My daughter had all the Reese's in one pile, all the KitKats, etc. So by the end, even though they had started off with chaos, it was now in order, and they had a plan for what was worth keeping and what was not for them. And I thought it was really smart that businesses could be doing the same thing.
And it would probably take you not that long to do this the same way. It didn't take them that long, so you just dump out everything. Especially as we're going into the end of the year here, there's only so much, so many hours, so many workdays left in our year before the holiday season really kicks in.
The holiday season takes up time. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but you know what I'm saying. So look at all your stuff, dump it out on the table, your projects, your to-do, your leads, your prospects, what you're supposed to be doing, and then start sorting it like my kids did. What am I gonna keep?
Anything that's gonna feed revenue between now and the end of the year or going into next year? What matters? What moves the needle? What do I want to trade? That task that could be delegated or automated, or set up for later. And then what am I gonna toss out? Just the busy work, the projects that have been dragging through this entire year that I just haven't gotten around to, or some days, like if it's been on your to-do list, if this year, what makes you think you're gonna do it next year.
Your business is not a garage. It's not a storage unit. If you can think of it more like a sorting table instead of collecting and hoarding things, get the stuff on there, make it visible. It's gonna be messy for a little while, but not too long. Make it a sorting table. Once it's out in the open and you see what actually matters, you'll be able to move faster. Because there's less to carry. There's less that you're holding onto. There's less that you see what's behind that thing that's blocking the view of the four things that you can't see and two things that you should be doing. So you have focus, you have clarity, and then you get momentum.
I'm probably projecting that this is too long. I would say my kids sorted their candy in 15 minutes. I bet it was even less than that. And I know that most businesses, most adults are gonna spend 15 days overthinking some kind of similar decision, and they're gonna call it strategic planning or maybe do some off-sites and come up with a SWOT analysis and all this stuff that goes into the end of the year when they didn't really move the needle this year.
So just dump it, sort it out, move it on. That's how you get some sweet treats.
3 Things To Do Now:
Sign up for Darin’s emails darinpersinger.com/email
Subscribe to Darin’s YouTube channel darinpersinger.com/youtube
Want to work with Darin? Visit darinpersinger.com/map