Hi Reader,

In some homes, there’s a place where things quietly accumulate. The basement.

It starts with a few extra boxes. Things you might need one day. (Usually, you don’t.) And then stuff just…stays.

Until something changes. It could be downsizing, a house that suddenly feels too full, or simply a moment where you decide it’s time.

That’s where Swedish death cleaning comes in. And yes, this idea does come from Sweden.

It’s a simple idea, however morbid it sounds. Get rid of your extras so someone else, aka your family and friends, don’t have to do it later.

And when you do a Swedish death clean, you’ll discover the duplicate and triplicate stuff, and sometimes even “why do I have four of these?”

All because there was a space to let the stuff build.

Our projects aren’t all that different. As they get bigger, so does the buildup of stuff, duplicate work and things no one owns anymore.

Something called a post-mortem is done as projects wrap up. Not everyone does it, but I think it’s a good idea.

It’s just like taking a walk through your basement. What stays…what goes. And what multiplied without you knowing it. I start mine halfway through the project instead of at the end, to catch the accumulation early on.

Although, I like to call it a retrospective instead of a post-mortem because it sounds less like we’re killing something. Or someone.

Here's a few questions I use with my teams:

1. Where did we do well?
2. Are we proud of the finished product?
3. Were the results what we wanted?
4. Which process or idea worked well?
5. Which process or ideas did not work out well?
6. What would we do differently next time?
7. What was the most satisfying part of this work?
8. So…what did we learn from this?

Starting half way through is like doing a mid-project cleanup. With things that aren’t going well, archive them. Label it, store it, and accept that you may never open that box again.

If something's works well and you’ve created seven copies of it, eliminate the ones you don’t need anymore. The less boxes the better.

For those things that didn’t work? Hand them over to someone else who could try them out. Donation with free pickup.

Because projects, like basements, don’t clean themselves. And the longer you wait, the more you’ll have to sort through later. Or worse yet, you'll leave it for someone else to clean up.

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