Dust management

Dust management

I’ve been working on a construction site for the last few weeks, since I bought a new house and decided to do everything myself. I’m building walls, replacing the electrical wiring, and, yes, installing a new sewage system, and I’m learning as I go. I’ve learned that much planning, preparing, shopping, measuring, and cleaning seem to get in the way of the actual work.

When you watch videos of people building a house or renovating a room, you always see the cool stuff: drilling holes, hammering in nails, using a circular saw, etc. Reality is much less exciting and much more tedious. It is incredible how much time you spend measuring, calculating, and re-measuring before you cut something, and then the actual cutting is just 2 seconds. The actual work is mostly planning, measuring, and cleaning. 

And there is so much more cleaning than you think. I spend an extraordinary amount of time getting rid of dust. And everything on the building site creates dust.

You might think you can ignore the dust until the moment you’re done with your renovation project, but that would be a mistake. When I bought and renovated my previous house, the foreman was a talkative guy who enjoyed teaching me the particulars of construction work, and I listened. He was meticulous about cleaning up at the end of the day. When I thought we were making good progress and had a good few hours before the end of the workday, he would stop everyone and instruct them to start cleaning up. Tools are returned to where they belong, all the trash is collected in bags, and the wood is stacked neatly against a wall. Then, he took a broom and then a vacuum and removed as much dust as possible. Not all of his workers enjoyed this end-of-the-day ritual, and if he didn’t force them to do it, they would leave the trash, dust, and tools right where they fell and left it there.

Now, it is very satisfying to show up to a clean and well-organised workspace the next day and not have to search for your tools, and most people appreciate that. But dust management is not high on most people’s priority list. Their opinion of themselves is that they’re here to construct, paint, and build, not to clean. But cleaning is such an important part of the whole process.

The problem is that dust doesn’t just end up on the floor where it is easy to vacuum up. It sticks to the ceiling, finds its way into your power and light sockets, and accumulates into every crevice and nook in every space in your house. If you’re not careful about dust management right from the start, that dust will ruin your life for months after you’re done renovating. You’ll close a door, and dust will rain from the ceiling. If you plug something into a power socket, a small cloud of dust will set on your device. Not all of it will be visible, and some you’ll inhale. You’ll be coughing, vacuuming, and cleaning for another year after you’re done with your actual renovation project.

A young startup founder once complained to me how he was distracted by work he wasn’t enjoying. His investors were bugging him, he had a burned-out employee to deal with, and he had some legal issues that were taking up a lot of his time. He felt frustrated and said, “I just want to work on my startup without all these distractions.” I laughed and told him, “This is the job! This is it!”

Running a company or managing a project is almost always tedious work you’re not interested in. You’re making sure that everyone else can focus on the actual work while you deal with all the details and little obstructions that seem to get in the way of work. You think you’re building a new house and get to use all the cool tools, but really, you’re just managing dust.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten Founder, TNW


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Maalinee Ramu

I help tech companies escape the high failure rate & become irresistible to their target market, by developing a strategy for their brand & translating their technical complexities into engaging messages|Brand Strategist

1mo

I got attracted to this article because I'm currently renovating my house. And this is so true. I love how you connected dust management with dealing with uninteresting tasks, as part of building a startup.

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