CrossFit Central’s Experience with Organization:

Do you have clutter in your gym? What about your office, storage area, equipment or even your house? If you do – then you’re not performing to the best of your abilities and this seemingly trivial “clutter” or “dis-organization” is actually holding you back from achieving. This might seem slightly dramatic; but I assure you, it’s the truth.

When things are well organized, clean and neat you and your staff are less stressful and in turn feel more organized. This clears space in your head for more important things like creativity and running your business effectively.

The Organized Experience @ Central:
On the gym floor everything has a place. The rowers, boxes, dumbbells, kettlebells – everything! Having and sticking to a standard for our equipment allows us to focus on what’s important – training our clients. Each time our clients come to class they know they will walk into a clean and well organized space allowing them to focus on their workout.

The Not-So-Organized Experience @ Central – The back storage room:
Our back storage room has been cleaned out and re-organized many many times. It’s a place where we store event and marketing things, retail, cleaning equipment, excess equipment, broken equipment, chairs, tables, etc etc etc. Left unchecked this room gets more and more cluttered as people store more and more things in the room. Since only coaches and staff see the back room and only on occasion, it’s organization sometimes falls by the way-side. Without having a clearly defined plan for where things belong coaches and staff put things where they can find an open spot – which breeds more unorganized clutter.

The Solution:
Our New Year Challenges and Holiday parties are only weeks away, knowing that we’ll need to get into the event area we decided it was time to clearly define and organize where things belong and stick to it! I wish we took a before photo but we were too excited to get busy organizing! Picture this – we couldn’t even get to the event area. We first had to organize and clear out everything in front of it. It was literally a mound of “stuff”. We only ended up throwing/giving away 3-4 items. This means we use everything that’s stored on a fairly regular basis; however, none of it had a permanent space.

Action Steps

• Clean, Organize and Clear
• Label EVERYTHING
  (Including what is inside of the storage bins so you don’t have to dig through them to find out)
• Put a system in place and a person or team in charge
  (Susan Bender is now in charge of this area. Anyone wanting to get things out of it or store things in it will have to talk to Susan and her marketing team first)
• Announce to the group the new system
• Check the space weekly – adjust accordingly