"Spring Cleaning"

2 seemingly unconnected events occurred here this week; one bad, one good.

First, the bad news. I lost a whole lot of excellent training material when my memory stick failed. A couple of weeks' work saved on the stick and now just refusing to show up on any of my computers.

Of course, as anyone with an ounce of computer sense will tell you, I should have backed up. It's the sensible thing to do and the obvious. But, lulled into a false sense of "it'll never happen to me", I didn't and now I'm paying the price in re-work and lost time.

Now on to the good news. Here in the UK, it looks like Spring has finally sprung. We've had the most glorious blue skies for the past week. The beach has been golden, the sea shimmering, and the air warm.

So, of course, you're dying to know: what connects the two?

Well, quite simply: maintenance.

Let me explain.

On our Time Management courses at ManageTrainLearn, we like to introduce our trainees to the Four Elements approach to managing time. Briefly, this approach divides up time tasks into four, each associated symbolically with one of the four elements of life. So, fire is activity and busyness; water is working with others; air is non-doing activity, such as thinking, planning, and preparation; and earth is routine, repair, and, yes, you've got it, maintenance.

That means taking time regularly to do some work on your goals and projects (fire), some work with others (water), some non-active work on thinking and recuperation (air), and some work on tidying up, going back to one's roots, cleaning out, and organising (earth).

Clearly, I hadn't been giving enough attention to my earth tasks and Mother Nature was waiting to give me a lesson.

For last week, as the sun came out day after day, I attended to... guess what? Yep, maintenance tasks around the house and garden. Me, who had forgotten the simple maintenance task of backing up my work, was getting stuck into Spring cleaning!

That's when it dawned on me that just as we need the four elements in our own lives, Nature performs them naturally. Winter for plans; Spring for maintenance; Summer for activity; and Autumn for time with others.

I hope this is a lesson I've learned: to give as much attention to the maintenance of my life's routines as I should to bringing work assignments in on time or spending time with colleagues or just sitting and dreaming.

After all, as someone reminded me when I told them this story, the word "maintenance" is derived from the Latin word "manus", meaning "hand" or "tool".

And so is the word "management".