If you’re anything like my wife, then the level of significance you place on the whole “New Year” thing is pretty low. After all, days make weeks, weeks make months and months make years. None of them is more special than the other so in and through all of them we should be learning, growing and seeking continuous improvement.

Be that as it may, many people do like to “start fresh” or “start right” when entering a new year, and 2018 is not going to be any different.

Rather than try to give you tips about how to lose weight (myfitnesspal.com) or be more productive (single-task!) I submit for your consideration my candidate for the only New Year’s resolution worth making and keeping:

Rid yourself of cruft.

Yep. You know the cruft I’m talking about. Even as you’re reading this and wondering how I define cruft, you’re also already thinking about some of the cruft in your life.

Google defines cruft as:

“Badly designed, unnecessarily complicated, or unwanted code or software.”

This isn’t a software post though, so my definition for the purpose of this post:

“Anything in your context (personal life, professional life, room, house, car, relationships, spiritual life etc.) that is no longer the best way to accomplish the thing it originally did.”

We all have that one special box, or drawer, or room that holds an assortment of this-n-thats that we’re convinced might come in handy again at some point. Some of it is clearly trash, but some of it “still works” and we hold on to it “just in case” or because… what’s that they say about if it ain’t broke..?

The problem with cruft is that it becomes a culture.

Too often we fall into habits that allow our cruft and our justification of why we keep our cruft to hide the real underlying issue: reliance and maintenance of cruft often masks inefficient or antiquated ways of doing things that really ought to be retired. In continuing to rely on the cruft, we spend more energy keeping things working than ensuring that they’re what they *should* be.

The truth is, cruft works. It lets us keep moving, continue working and generally be comfortable – but it does so at a high price: every opportunity for efficiency and betterment that we miss (or worse, choose to ignore) because the status quo is good enough, makes it that much more difficult and costly to get it right when we find ourselves in a situation where we must!

So, my challenge to you as we end 2017 and step into 2018: Rid yourself of cruft. If you do, drop me a line at vance@auratechtt.com and let me know what it is and how it’s going.

Enjoy what’s left of this year and see you on the flipside! God bless.