How Your Desk Is Killing Your Productivity & Stressing You Out

By Carlon Haas | September 17, 2007

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A book fell on my hand! It literally came crashing down smacking my right hand and sending my co-workers rushing to my rescue. To gain maximum sympathy, I acted as if my hand was broken and would have to go to the hospital at any moment.

After a couple of minutes of method acting, and my co-workers leaving me to my misery, I wanted to discover how it was that a book (a thick usage dictionary) came to land on my hand.

Well, it was little crazy actually…

…because the book was on top of a large stack of papers, which in turn was on top of a large stack of folders. And when the wind was blowing through the office, I guess I put the dictionary on top of it, to stop all those papers from flying all over the place.

This got me thinking. As I looked at my desk, I saw it was full of books, papers, post-it notes, pens, and all sorts of other “stuff.” I thought it made me look busy. The only problem is that I couldn’t find anything. And despite my efforts, the stacks of papers never seemed to disappear. In fact, the stack only got bigger.

So, I said “this is it.”

With the exception of some immediate work, I threw away all the papers. I put the books on the bookshelf and was left with a perfectly cleared off desk. The only thin on it was my computer, a red pen, and 6 pages I needed to edit right away.

The then the most amazing thing happened. I edited the pages. Done. Finished. That was my big job for the day! So, I went onto tomorrow’s task on the computer. One hour later. Done finished.

Before it would have taken me a day to do it. What was the difference?

Lack of clutter on my desk. Seeing my productivity go up leaves me with only one conclusion:

A cluttered desk is a cluttered mind.

Once I removed the clutter from my desk, I got a new sense of purpose. The clutter on my desk was not aiding my work ability; it was distracting me. And having a bunch of things on my desk did not make me look busy; it made me look unorganized (which I was).

So, now, I keep a clear desk. At the end of every day, I clear off my desk completely and come to work the next day with a clutter-free mind.

And today I recommend this to you. If you want to get more work done with a clearer mind, take all the garbage off your desk. Try working in a clutter-free environment and see just how your mind reacts to it.

I think you’ll see, just like I did, that your production will increase dramatically and more importantly you can take the pressure off yourself. The stress of having all that clutter around you adds a lot of pressure to finish it all. And you also can feel like you aren’t getting anything done.

By removing the clutter from your desk, the pressure and stress it produces in your mind will be removed as well.

Did you find this helpful? Consider buying me a cup of coffee.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Spread the Word: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.