A rapid path to a decluttered desk
Spill hot chocolate all over your desk. Or coffee, if that’s your preferred drink. Hot chocolate is mine.
Week after week, I had been telling myself to get rid of the clutter on my desk. Late last year, I had the clutter trimmed down but it’s beginning to grow again. Week after week, I put off addressing the clutter and instead, feed it a little.
Fortunately, before it became a monstrosity, I spilled a huge mug of hot chocolate all over my desk. Ordinarily, this is not a good thing to do but my first reaction was to be thankful that my laptop was spared since it sat atop a notebook raiser. Colleagues dashed over offering paper towels, grabbing some of the documents off my desk. I gathered all the papers and dumped them on the floor under my desk while I finished cleaning up my desk. Then I made another cup of hot chocolate (I really needed it) and finished it before I was ready to tackle the unfortunate stack of papers.
With a shredder bin within reach, I reviewed each document. These documents, most of which I had planned to review (at some future time) looked less attractive with brown stains around their edges. So one by one, they all went into the shredder bin. Until I had just two bits of information I needed to act upon. I had nothing that I also didn’t have in electronic format if I was suddenly hit by a need to read it.
As I took in my clean desk with appreciation, I wondered WHY I had all those documents sitting on my desk in the first place. A colleague stopped by. “Having a bad morning?”, she asked.
“Oh no! It’s a good morning. I’ve got a clean desk.”
