My youngest daughter is home from college for holiday break and has noticed a few things changed while she was away this fall.
The pantry is revamped. The coat closet is neat and usable. If she went into our closet she’d find room on the shelves. And the dreaded junk drawer in the kitchen?
Not crowded with random charging cables, scotch tape and nearly dry highlighters. It’s an actual usable storage spot!
What changed?
Maybe a bit of empty nest syndrome - but in reality we finally made the intentional decision to clean things out to make things easier.
Now we can find spices and not keep rebuying things we don’t remember we have.
We audited our clothes to weed out things that didn’t fit or were out of style (like that double breasted suit I still had).
And now we have a small toolkit in the junk drawer that we can find and use when we need a quick repair.
The ease of daily operations in our home applies even more in a company setting.
Leaders and teams will have meetings to make some decisions, open up the junk drawer, see the mess and just close it.
“Lets just buy that software that the vendor keeps trying to sell us. That will fix the current issue”
Do you need that ‘solution”? Is it even a problem? Who or what do you have in house already?
No one knows because no one wants to lead the process of going through the junk drawer. IT’s just easier to buy something new, that will also end up in the junk drawer at some point.
The answer is always to dump out the drawer first.
At home, we didn’t buy new shelving systems or hire a professional organizer. We just pulled everything out, looked at what we actually had, and got rid of what we didn’t need. The solutions were already there - they were just buried.
The same is true in business.
Before you sign that software contract, before you hire that consultant, before you greenlight that “solution” the vendor keeps pitching - dump out your decision drawer.
What problems are you actually trying to solve? What resources do you already have? What decisions have you been avoiding that are creating this mess in the first place?
Here’s what I’ve found working with founders: most companies have 3-5 real decisions buried in that drawer. The rest is just accumulated clutter.
Once you can see what’s actually in there, the decision becomes obvious. You either have the tool you need (you just couldn’t find it), or you know exactly what’s missing and can go get it.
But you can’t make that call with the drawer shut.