Tidy Desk
There’s a saying that a tidy desk is the sign of a sick mind. (Or that a spotless house is the sign of a wasted life . . . )
With VPNs and the like, more and more of us work from home, where there’s no boss to drop by and be horrified at the state of your work area.
But the problem is that having a messy desk, with lots of clutter and things on the go, makes it really hard to concentrate on what you should be doing. You’d be astonished at how much time is lost to diversions (picking up some easy / interesting work when what you should be doing gets boring / difficult), or looking for stuff that’s ‘in this pile somewhere’.
So seeing as it’s Monday, set yourself the task this week of having a really good clear out of all the clutter. Put an hour in your diary to go through all that stuff, and either bin it, or file it.
Who knows - although December is a short working month, you might find that by getting organised in the first place, you get a whole lot more done.
(a) Don’t steal images from other peoples’ web sites, especially without attribution.
(b) If your productivity is affected significantly by having a lot of resources within arms reach, cleaning up your desk is not going to help.
Hi -
a) The attribution seems to have gone astray - *my apologies*, as I’m still having some teething troubles as a new user of Wordpress. It was there, then it was gone - I must have pressed the wrong button / done something wrong, what more can I say!
b) Yep, this is true. However, we often (and I’m as guilty as the next on this) build up a clutter of stuff that actually isn’t needed right now, today, or even this week.
The trick is to have a system that keeps the stuff you use several times a day to hand, the things you use daily within reach, and everything else progressively more ’stored’. So ON my desk, all I have is my PC, phones, coffee (!), iPod, a notebook / jotter pad, and whatever document I’m working on right now. In the desk drawer are things like the paper knife, stapler, rule, TuneTalk, scissors, etc. The printer is on it’s own stand, which has trays underneath for A4, US-Letter, headed paper, envelopes, and supplies. On the bookshelves next to me are only those books that get used on a weekly basis - the rest are in a cupboard below. Things like the VAT / inland revenue tax forms are only accessed once every three months, so they’re in the cupboard on the other side of the room.
This sounds a little extreme, but what it means is that I can really concentrate on what I’m supposed to be doing. Although writing such long responses to comments probably isn’t it
Karl.
Apology accepted–thanks :-).
One thing I’ve noticed over time is that different people are distracted by different things. For example, I don’t find visual complexity to be very distracting, and I strongly value not having to go searching for books and other reference materials when I need to refer to them. However, audio complexity is very distracting to me–when I’m working in an office with other people talking, on go the headphones or I’ll get very little done (even though the conversations may be fascinating). Other people need to have more visual order, but don’t mind background chatter, speakerphones, etc. in the background. Learning which aspects of your environment do and don’t distract you is an important step.