10 Tips to Help Keep Your Desk Clean
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How much stuff do you have sitting on your desk or in your work area? A while back, Coopers & Lybrand (now Price Waterhouse Coopers) released data from a poll on personal organization. One statistic found that, “The average desk worker has 36 hours worth of work on their desk and wastes up to 3 hours a week just “looking” for STUFF!” Finding stuff on my messy desk bears out that statistic. Being disorganized is responsible for a lot of wasted time.
While there is a challenge in the initial cleaning of the messy desk, the regular maintenance often poses the bigger challenge. Here are some tips to help keep the desk clean:
- Sort your mail and toss junk as it arrives. Even with an in-basket, you need to process your mail daily to avoid accumulating a stack of paper.
- Get rid of sticky notes and scraps of paper. Get a single notebook and use it to record notes, phone numbers, web addresses, ideas, to-dos, etc.
- Create a list or binder of regularly referenced material, such as phone numbers, and keep it accessible in a desk drawer.
- Schedule filing time at least once per week.
- Add dated or calendar items to a tickler file system or a diary as soon as they arrive.
- When you stop working on something, put it away until the next time you need it. Don’t leave half-completed projects sitting on your desktop.
- Keep nothing on your desk unless you absolutely need them. If you aren’t joining sheets of paper with tape, move the dispenser off the desk. If you want personal photos in the office, have only one on the desk or better yet, hang them on the wall.
- Keep a reading folder for material you need to read. Schedule a regular reading time to clear that material.
- Create a “waiting for” or pending file to hold items dependent on outside action.
- Create a weekly appointment to clean your desk and this includes dusting or polishing. You might be less inclined to mess up a shiny desk.
It doesn’t take much “neglect” for your workspace to fill up with things that eat at your productivity. A few simple and regular good habits can free up a bunch of extra time for getting things done.
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Comments
This is good advice for many folks, but this would completely suck for me as a card-carrying member of the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ club. If I were to follow tips like #6 (”When you stop working on something, put it away until the next time you need it. Don’t leave half-completed projects sitting on your desktop.”), I’d never get around to finishing anything.
I recommend a book called “Organizing for your brain type” (ISBN: 0312339771), which offers suggestions for the different ways in which many people think. The author breaks it down to four types (which may be a little simplistic in some ways) corresponding to how we live and think.
Great list.
A friend of mine, Van, went to an awesome extreme for #7. He put all of his computer peripherals under his desk!
In support of what bvssunnydale said, I have a similar system.
I use zimWiki on linux, this way, I can easily be writting something, like a snippet of php code, and if theres an instance of HTML or CSS in there, it will link to the appropriate section…
This is very easy to implement, and I keep the Wiki directory on my USB drive…
The home page links to my most common sections (mostly GTD related) and there is also an inbox section, where I can add info when not running the app.
All the files are stored as plain text files, with names like home.txt, inbox.txt etc, and this system is highly protable as I carry my USB pretty much everywhere.
Also, its easy to search, as each text file has a meaningful name, and is pure text
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Keep in mind that the main reason most people have a messy desk is out of fear of losing something - the (erroneous) theory is that if something’s physically close then you’ll be able to put your hands on it quickly. Since most of this stuff is actually INFORMATION and not the paper it lives on, my recommendation is to (1) use a text database program like askSam (unfortunately the indexed version is both indispensible and overpriced at $400) or (2) create a separate document for each category of information (I’m at 12,749 after a decade), e.g. HTML Editors, Chicken Recipes, Fat & Diet, etc., and use a free program like Coperinic, Google Desktop to find them quickly. The trick for any of them is to learn to use MULTIPLE TAGS so that you can find them, otherwise - for example, your searches will pull up a thousand documents with the word ‘HTML’ in them. My tags (just text at the top of each document - immediately following the description line) might be (for “HTML TEXT EDITORS”: htmlt editt editort editorst textt webt designt. Notice I added the “t” but it could be any letter (consistency is the key). It helps enormously because I typically might search for “htmlt” and “textt” and can (almost) instantly find the documents I’m looking for. I also create an index at the top of each document summarizing and dating each item as its added - trust me, after doing this for a decade - it makes all the difference in the world between information-overload and the ability to find and organize things timely. Personally I prefer askSam and (either way) it takes time and effort to implement but for every hour I put into it, it probably saves me four (and reduces stress). Just a suggestion.