Desk

We spent a large amount of time at work. The physical location where we spent the majority of the time thinking, doing, writing, replying and deciding plays a big role in our daily routine.

A cluttered desk, a disorganized room or a noisy location don’t necessarily mean lack of productivity or poor performance, however they can, in my experience, affect how we work and how well we reach our full potential.

This is how my desk looks when I get to work in the morning. Here’s another example I like.
I make it a point to clean the desk from the days’s work papers and objects at the end of the day so that the next morning I will arrive and have a fresh start. I tend to put things away as soon as I am done using them and I tried not to have too many things in front of me that can pull my attention (pictures for example, or containers with pens, etc).

The system I use is not a complex one and it is one that can be also applied to the computer file organization as well: I simply take care of things as soon as they are in front of me. If a piece of paper is not important any more I shred it. If a piece of information needs to be taken care then I do it as right away if I can or file it on a drawer under Do Right Now. Stuff that I might need in the future as a reference gets either scanned and converted into a PDF or archived under important on another drawer. Once I get an object from the Do Right Now drawer and perform an action on it then I decide whether I need it after that or not. If not, then it gets shredded.

It’s a simple system that works for me. It needs to be simple, we are busy all the time and complicated things might make you a bit crazy. To me a system has to be simple in order to work, otherwise it will fail and be discarded.