We talk a lot in my team about the concept of ‘pruning’.

Instead of waiting for a ‘garden’ to become overrun, we think about what we can do on a daily or weekly basis to keep everything neat and tidy.

The idea is to avoid a massive ‘working bee’ at the end.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot when it comes to my email inbox. Over the years, I’ve wound up on countless mailing lists. Some are useful, some I think are useful but never open, and some are so irrelevant I genuinely wonder how they have my details.

After years of letting spam pile up then dutifully deleting it, I’ve recently started to unsubscribe each time I see an email I don’t want. It takes just a moment to clear my life of each batch, preventing a future pile up.

I’ve been curious about how much time I’ve spent over the years doing mass deletes, rather than investing a few minutes to pull the problem out at the roots.

When it comes to our money, this is not a foreign story.

Small effort, big change

We see new bank fees popping up, a subscription that we need to cancel, a charge that looks a bit funky. Often we ignore them thinking we’ll tackle it all on another day.

More often than not, we’re bundling these little tasks together, and soon they become a ‘too hard basket’. We then moan that we’ve got so much life admin weighing us down, and never do it.

When it comes to banking and finances, putting off action could be costing us some serious dollars over time.

So I wonder if we can apply the concept of pruning to our finances, rather than facing the overwhelm of the working bee? Can we tackle the issues one by one?

Let’s do it! And we can celebrate the little wins along the way.