My office at work used to be an absolute mess. For the longest time, I had stacks and stacks of papers literally everywhere (as I've said in the past - see "Today's word is Tsundoku" - I am addicted to printing out articles and saving them to read later, except most of the time it takes a very long time to actually read them). A few months ago, I actually spent a few hours cleaning up my stacks. Of course I found that in some cases, I had multiple copies of the same article! I still have stacks of articles, but now they are at least hidden out of sight. The question is whether I will forget about them now that they are hidden, but that's a question for another day. I have to confess that I felt very good about finally having a clean desk.
Apparently, our brains are wired to like order. As Libby Sander wrote in an online article for Harvard Business Review (see "The Case for Finally Cleaning Your Desk"), "When our space is a mess, so are we." It's easy to understand how much time we can spend searching for a lost document on a cluttered desk. As it turns out, the same is true if we've gone completely digital - one international survey (see Melissa Webster's white paper from 2012, "Bridging the information worker productivity gap: New challenges and opportunities for IT") found that workers lose up to 2 hours per week searching for lost digital documents! But it goes much deeper than that. What was news to me is that clutter can adversely effect our behavior and emotions. Clutter has negative effects on stress and anxiety levels, our ability to focus, our eating choices, and our sleep! It's no wonder that Marie Kondo is so popular these days!
Clutter is bad! But as I learned from my own personal experience, de-cluttering your workspace is not only possible, it's refreshing and reinvigorating! So, what are you waiting for? Go clean your room!
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