Traditionally, spring is the time to sweep out the dark corners that were neglected over the winter, open up a window or two, shake out the rugs and perform all of those once-a-year cleaning rituals.

That’s in your physical space.

And with everything feeling so fresh and new, the spring cleaning frenzy may even spill out of your home and into the confines of your office.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

Spring Cleaning doesn’t matter in the virtual space.

Paperless. It means no paper. No shuffling, stacking, sorting or filing. It’s simplified, streamlined, and it’s why we keep moving more and more physical items into the virtual space.

We didn’t want to deal with a pocket full of receipts, so we started scanning them.

We didn’t want to search through and store stacks of physical resumes, so we invested in recruiting software.

Cleaning Up with the Could

Even our virtual space is becoming cleaner, leaner, and increasingly virtual. Now, instead of storing multiple files across our devices, we send them to the cloud, and summon them when we please. How’s that for eliminating desktop file folders?

Things are getting so clean, that our desktops might be a thing of the past in the very near future. Cloud paging is being hyped as the next technology to change the software industry, allowing software applications to be housed in the cloud. Check in the software you need from whichever device you’re using at the moment, and send it away when you’re ready to move on to a different task. No need to clutter a hard drive with a plethora of software applications.

Search, Don’t Scrub

Of course, no matter where you store your records, files, and software, they have to exist somewhere.

But today’s searching technology means that you don’t ever have to touch your data until you need it.

You don’t have to spend time reorganizing your files.

Looking for a document? Search with your document explorer. Can’t find an email? Search in Outlook. Trying to recall a candidate’s availability? Search for them in Sendouts.

And searching is constantly getting smarter. It’s more sophisticated that just keyword matching. Semantic searching uses context to derive meaning out of a search, providing even better results.

If you need to rearrange your files or de-clutter the icons on your desktop - go for it. It’s therapeutic.

But if you need to save time, do something productive and skip spring cleaning altogether.

When you’re in the virtual space, you don’t have to clean up.

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image from here.

this post originally appeared at www.sendouts.com.