“Time waits for no one” was premiered in June on BBC Radio 2. It is a lost track sung by Freddie Mercury in what was a piano rehearsal of the song. How appropriate for a track with this name to be premiered halfway through the year! The end of June is a good reminder that really time waits for no one. Whatever your idea of 2019 has been, half of it has passed by now. So how do I make the next six months count as much (if not more than) the last six? It is in this vein that I look back on June and write about three lessons which resonated with me in June and which I will carry with me in the next half of the year:

One consultant I never expected to find interesting:

To my wife’s delight, I found myself reading about Marie Kondo and her philosophy on decluttering your life through tidying up. It is pretty impressive to see the scale of Kondo’s following, of her book and her Netflix show. She is even able to call herself a consultant on the topic. My DNA is probably not tuned to decluttering by default but over the years I have come to appreciate having my physical and mental space ‘tidy’. Two books which inspired me to do more of this were The One Thing (by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan) and The Laws of Simplicity (by John Maeda). ‘The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction’ is the first law in the latter. The former advocates simplifying one’s workload through focusing on the most important task. Tidying my physical and mental space is surely something I want to do more of over the next six months. 

One cooking experience worth writing about:

Tidying up hopefully leads to extra time and space, but also requires dealing with extra stuff So what do you do with the extra? Waste it or put it to good use? In June I joined some colleagues in spending a morning at Oz Harvest. The charity rescues 180 tonnes of food each week. The food comes from 3,500 food donors and reaches the communities who need it as ingredients in prepared meals. The meals are prepared by companies like Vodafone who decide to dedicate a few hours cooking with proper chefs in the OzHarvest kitchen. In the words of Pope Francis,

“waste reveals an indifference towards things and towards those who go without. Wastefulness is the crudest form of discarding…to throw food away means to throw people away”.

Even though both  my OzHarvest experience and the quote by Pope Francis refer to food waste, throwing away anything is a waste of opportunity I would like to avoid in the next six months, be it time, money or anything else. 

One word to which I will dedicate time for the rest of the year:

Earlier this year I started working on a big insight piece which has in June become my full-time job. The piece is broad, yet the ask is simple…focus on the ‘why’. Hence it is not surprising that the book I plan to read next is The Book of Why by Dana Mackenzie and Judea Pearl. However, beyond my customer experience research, I feel that the process of tidying up one’s life and putting the extra to good use points towards getting to know in a deep way why you do what you do. Last month I watched the movie The Little Prince for the nth time. Here’s one quote which delves deeper into one’s purpose and search for meaning: 

“People where you live, the little prince said, grow five thousand roses in one garden… Yet they don’t find what they’re looking for… And yet what they’re looking for could be found in a single rose.”

If you have ever run a (half) marathon, you can identify with the state of mind when you get past half the distance. It gives you the satisfaction of having one half behind you, and at the same time reminds you that you need to use the remaining energy you have left for just as much the length. With that reality in mind, you just press on, and encourage yourself on the basis of how far you have already progressed. 

So this is what I wish for you (and me) in the remaining months of 2019. I hope you make the most of the time by decluttering the noise, making the extra more meaningful, and in the process find the ‘single rose’ which answers your deepest WHY.