Time for a Clean Slate?

In her book Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin highlights strategies for making and breaking habits. She suggests a clean slate strategy when you have the opportunity to start or stop a new habit – such as not installing all of your apps on a new phone, or taking advantage of a new commute to read more. Rubin says “There’s a magic to the beginning of anything. We want to begin right, and a good start feels auspicious…It’s a shame not to exploit the power of the Strategy of the Clean Slate when it presents itself.”

This past summer I made a major job transition and started thinking about the clean slate. I left my Town Manger role in Needham on July 4, 2025, and have started a new role as the Northeast Regional Director for the International City/County Management Association. This is a part-time, fully-remote role. In the three weeks that I had between jobs (I don’t recommend this) I quizzed everyone I met about their experience with a clean slate. Many of them mentioned starting a new job, moving to a new home, and both joyful and painful family transitions.

Concrete clean slate examples included changing from a nickname to a full name, changing email strategies like tone, inbox zero, and scheduling, not saving and filing every email, not making paper copies, avoiding emojis, setting new boundaries, and establishing closing rituals to end the workday.

To my surprise, when I asked about clean slate ideas, what I heard most was people wishing they could “clean slate” workplace behaviors. To be honest (and longtime readers know how I feel about self-reflection), we have probably all exhibited some form of these at some point in our careers. Unofficial survey results indicate that people would like to see less of these traits at work:

• Impatience
• Complaining
• Sarcasm
• Gossiping
• Defensiveness
• Know-it-all-ing
• Over-talking
• Over-sharing
• Close talking
• Arrogance
• Contrariness
• Passive aggression
• Looking at phones in meetings
• Non-responsiveness.

So how am I doing three months into my new role? I can confidently say that I delete some emails. Typically these are the one word kind like “thanks” or “great.” Baby steps. I once had a colleague who deleted EVERY email under the assumption that she could simply search her deleted folder if she needed something. That’s one way to get to inbox zero, but it makes me break into a cold sweat. My former colleagues will be astonished to learn that I have not printed a single work document in three months. To be fair, this is mostly because personal printers are generally terrible, and my brand new one takes about a minute to print one page and runs out of ink every nine pages. Not to worry, I still have a paper calendar and notebook. I have been mindful of exclamation points in email, and I am no longer thinking about whether to send an email outside of “normal business hours” since I have no one working for me. (I do wish I had been more thoughtful about that in the past). Finally, I make it a point to look at the list of traits people dislike in leaders and colleagues – and am diligently trying to avoid them.

How about you? Do you have a memorable clean slate story? Do any of the annoying workplace traits resonate with you?

Let’s practice, taking advantage of opportunities to start fresh (or buying more notebooks and pens – after all it is autumn).