Manage Your Desk for Performance

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The quality and ambience of your work space is at its best when it demonstrates the quality and ambience of your life, or how you would like your life to be: rearrange your desk, change your life. Find your personal “zone.” The zone is the place and space where you do your best work, where you are in the groove and where your work is exemplary. Procrastination has little chance here, even with you.

Joe Sugarman, in his book Success Forces, explains that by clearing your desk every evening, you automatically have to choose what to work on the next day. Though such reasoning is contrary to the advice of time management “experts,” I wholeheartedly endorse it. It is a discipline that yields a marvelous ability to get started in the morning while others find themselves only slowly getting out of the gate.

To create my own “mini-desk workout,” I keep some items on the far end of my desk so that I have to reach to use them. I fight procrastination, and I stretch my muscles!

What about inside your desk? Include frequently needed supplies, but remember: a desk is not a supply cabinet. Maintain a drawer of personal items – your desk is there to support you. Tissues or cough drops are okay. Sorry, your Game Boy is not. Include any needed forms of heavily used items, but leave a 20 percent vacancy. Constantly review what you’re holding and decide to retain or toss it. Near, but not on your desk, go the familiar items such as pictures, plants, and motivators. Also, install any supporting accoutrements, from full-spectrum lighting to ocean wave music, if they support your productivity, efficiency, and creativity (and if your coworkers don’t mind).

To ensure that your desk and work environment support your productivity, invest in yourself. If you need them and can obtain approval from the powers that be, room dividers and sound barriers are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can improve upon any existing sound barriers. The gentle, rhythmic “white noise” of a small fan’s motor serves as a sound buffer to many of the sounds that may distract you.

Every evening after you’ve cleared your desk, congratulate yourself for what you accomplished that day. Don’t do a number on yourself and beat yourself up for what you didn’t do. Nothing would be accomplished, and you’d be in pain. It’s likely that you’re doing the best you can. If you can do better, you will – maybe not immediately, but soon enough, certainly by the next millennium.

So as previously recommended, do your filing and come up smiling. Use the end of the day, slow periods, or periods of low personal energy to revamp your files, keep your desk orderly, and better prepare yourself for high-octane output when you’re ready to get started again.

After you’ve cleared your desk, apply the same principle to your computer’s desktop, your inbox, the top of your file cabinet, closet shelves, and other areas of your life – your dining-room table, your car’s glove compartment, the trunk of your car, and your health club locker (if not for better organization than at least for your personal hygiene). The fewer things you have in these places, the greater sense of control you have over your environment. Once these flat surfaces are under control, self-starters gain a heightened sense of control over their time.



Regards,



Timben