Trim some waste

Being a climate conscious organisation isn’t always about buying ethical, finding better suppliers, using recyclable packaging, or becoming a BCorp.

A far less sexy option… reducing waste can enormously sway your impact, as well as your time, profit, and mental well-being.

Sure – use less paper and disposable coffee cups, but also minimise as much of these types of waste as you can:

👉 Time waste – busywork, procrastinating, focusing on unimportant tasks because they’re easy, looking for 1% improvements when 80/20 is more than enough.

👉 Marketing waste – buying more flyers or booklets or business cards or whatever “just in case”.

👉 Promotional waste – junk with your logo on it because you think people care about your brand as much as you do (they don’t).

👉 Digital waste – hoarding analytics, heatmap recordings, browser screenshots, cookies and other data, a very small percentage of which is useful but for the most part, is useless.

👉 Financial waste – spending cash on services that a product isn’t ready for, like SEO or digital ads.

👉 Resource waste – allowing contractors contacts to run on for longer than you really needed them to.

👉 Emotional waste – working late into the night on a client request that you know from their track record is poor use of time, and will likely be changed.

👉 Career waste – droning away in an unfulfilling job when you know a more purposeful calling is waiting elsewhere (and fully appreciating that changing jobs is not easy at the best of times, especially when you throw in a career change).

Cutting losses is not the best option 100% of the time, but it might be a great option for something right now.