The career declutter this autumn you have been quietly promising yourself is not, it turns out, the week-long administrative retreat you feared. Martin Balcome, chief executive of Bridgewater Talent Integration and also CEO of BMI Ltd, a staffing and recruiting company, has distilled the process into a handful of targeted moves, the kind that take an afternoon, not a sabbatical. Balcome, who has served as President of EO Atlantic Canada and remains an active member, works regularly with professionals navigating exactly this kind of professional inertia. His advice is less about grand reinvention and more about the quiet ruthlessness of editing.
Start With the Calendar, Not the Inbox
The inbox is a decoy. It feels urgent, so we stare at it, and the calendar (the thing that is actually governing our days) goes unexamined. Balcome’s first instruction is to look, properly, at what fills your diary. ‘It’s likely that there are certain tasks that you’ve kept doing simply because they’ve always been done but aren’t necessary anymore,’ he says. Weekly meetings attended without fail but with no clear purpose. Three spreadsheets saying the same thing in three formats. The accumulated sediment of old ways of working that nobody has bothered to question.
His prescription is blunt: ‘If something doesn’t have a clear purpose, ask yourself if you really need to keep doing it, or if you can use that time for something more productive. Be ruthless.’ It is the kind of advice that sounds obvious until you actually sit with a calendar and try to do it, at which point the habit of attendance (the professional politeness of showing up) makes every deletion feel slightly transgressive. That friction is the point.
A Career Declutter This Autumn Means Unlearning, Not Only Learning
The second move is less visible but probably more consequential. Balcome asks you to identify one professional habit worth dismantling. Replying to every email the moment it arrives. Switching between tasks before any single one is finished. The small behavioural tics that once signalled diligence and have since calcified into reflex. ‘Career progression doesn’t always mean learning new skills, sometimes it means unlearning behaviour and bad habits that were once useful, but you have now outgrown,’ he says. One habit, this season. Not a personality overhaul.
From there, Balcome turns to what he calls ‘career cushions’: the CV kept perpetually updated, the LinkedIn profile tended like a kitchen garden, the networking kept gently ticking over. These are not bad habits. Regularly refreshing your professional profile and maintaining a network is sound practice. But when the cushions start generating their own anxiety, when the backup plan becomes louder than the current plan, it is time to edit. Keep the preparations that make you feel capable and in control. Pause the ones that do not.
The ‘one day’ list deserves its own reckoning. Most professionals carry one: the course never enrolled in, the industry event perpetually deferred, the project sketched on a napkin three years ago and filed under intention. These items, Balcome notes, ‘can take up a lot of mental space, even when they don’t take up time.’ His solution is characteristically direct. If it will genuinely benefit your career, assign it a deadline. If it will not, release it. The list is not a museum; it does not need to preserve every ambition you have ever had.
The final point, and arguably the one that underpins the others, concerns work-life balance. Not the concept, which everyone endorses in the abstract, but the specific, granular behaviours: the laptop open during dinner, the emails checked between Instagram posts, the morning meeting rehearsed mentally at midnight. Balcome does not suggest stopping everything at once. Instead, he recommends identifying the single boundary-breaker that would make the largest difference and making its removal non-negotiable for a fortnight. Then begin again with the next one.
‘Make this non-negotiable for two weeks and then start again with something else until your work-life balance is restored,’ he says. There is something almost tailoring-like in the approach, the idea that a well-fitted professional life is achieved through successive, deliberate alterations rather than a single dramatic cut. Stylist, where Balcome’s advice first appeared, frames the exercise as seasonal housecleaning, which is precisely right. Done properly, it should need revisiting only a few times a year.
