As a tribute to “National Clean Your Desk Day”, I thought that now would be a good time for me to share my thoughts on clean desks.  Since January is also “Get Organized Month”, this seemed like an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

As someone who used to thrive in the chaos of a messy desk, I could never understand what all the fuss was about.  When anybody tried to get me to change, I used to remind them of Einstein’s comment on tidy desks:

If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?
Albert Einstein

More recently though, I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of working in a clean and tidy environment.

Last year, I was off work for some time suffering from stress and this led me to look much more closely at everything that I was doing to identify every last pressure that I was experiencing and find ways to remove them.  I noticed that whenever I sat at my desk in my home office, I started to feel stressed.  I remembered reading at some point that clutter on the desk serves as a constant distraction to your subconscious.  It’s always calling out “I need attention”, or “remember you have to work on me”, or even just “you forgot to file me – you’ll never find me when you need me!”  With all this going on in our minds, whether we realize it or not we end up more stressed – and it’s no wonder really!

Once I had this eureka moment, I set about tidying and sorting and filing and organizing and even cleaning my workspace then sat down again to see what difference it had made.  It was amazing.  It was like night and day.  I could now relax at my desk and focus purely on the task at hand!

Since then, I’ve been very careful about keeping my office tidy and organized and it’s had a real calming influence on me.  I’ve become much more productive with my blogs which could never have happened in my former chaos.

If you’re facing a similar challenge, here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Start by removing everything from your desk

If you have on your desk only the things that belong there, you automatically feel calmer and more able to focus with the chaos that you’ve probably just dumped on the floor (tip – don’t cut off your exit route in case you need to get away from the debris for a while!)

2. Make a decision about what to do with every item that you removed in step 1

It’s no good leaving everything on the floor and just having a tidy desk – you need to work your way through the rubble so that your whole office ends up organized.  There are only four options that you have for each thing that you pick up:

• Do it
• Delegate it
• Diary it
• Dump it

What do these mean?  Well, let’s take a look:

Do It

This means that we deal with it right now.  Maybe it’s a form that needs filling out and mailing.  Maybe it’s a reminder to send a quick email.  As a general guideline, we’re talking here about things that you can do in a minute or two then be done with it.  Once you’ve done it, you can either file the associated paperwork or bin it.

The other key part of doing it is to file everything that needs filing as soon as you pick it up.  Quite simply, if you need to keep it but don’t need to do anything with it for the foreseeable future then get it filed and move on.

Delegate It

Some of the things that you pick up could maybe be handled more effectively by someone else.  I found that when sorting my office, much of what I was hoarding on my desk were actually things that my wife would normally deal with!  If you can delegate it, do that immediately.

Diary It

Most often you’ll pick things up that need more than a few minutes work but do need you to spend some time on.  Create a file for these items and make a note in your daily planning system to follow up with it at a specific time (you DO have a planning system don’t you???)  One idea that I like to work with is a 1-31 file.  Let’s say I have something today that I don’t have time to work on right now but I know that I’ll have time on Friday.  I simply put this in the pocket labeled 15 (since Friday’s the 15th)  and schedule time in my diary to work on it.  Each day, I then take out the folder for today and everything that I need for today’s tasks is at hand!  At the end of today, my file goes to the back so that tomorrow’s folder is at the front.

Dump It

This is the easiest of the four to understand.  If you don’t need it, throw it away.  At first you may find this challenging, but trust me, once you get going you’ll find it really therapeutic!

It’s important to be ruthless here and throw away everything that you don’t really need to keep.  It’s better to throw away that magazine you’ve been keeping “just in case you need to refer to the article one day” and to regain your sanity than to have it (and its friends) preying on your psyche!  If you really do need to refer to something, the chances are very high that you can find it on Google!

3. Keep it up!

It’s easy to drop back into your old habits after doing an exercise like this, but that’s the worst thing that you can do!  Think of all the effort that you’ve just put in to get a clear desk?!?  Now that it’s free and you have the freedom to focus, get into the habit of handling everything that comes across your desk just once, using the 4 decisions above.

If you find that you need help clearing your desk, I can recommend an excellent book called “Clear Your Desk” by Declan Treacy.  This book is a little old, but the concepts in it are timeless.  This book was the first place where I ever came across the 4 decisions and was very helpful when I made the decision to get organized last year.  Like I said, if you’re struggling, go and read it.

I’d love to hear from you.  Do you work best with a tidy desk or are you with Einstein on this one?  Do you have any other tips that we could all learn from?  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Good luck!

No related posts.