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We spend a lot of time at our desks daily. Students, professionals, entrepreneurs… whatever your journey, you likely have a designated space in your home that you call your “desk,” or if you work in an office building you may have a cubicle or office, etc. But if your workstation is crowded with clutter you could be losing focus more than you realize. There’s two thing you can do to bring your focus back up.
- Invest in a pair of horse blinders so you don’t see the clutter, or
- Remove the clutter.
While investing in the blinders may be the easier route, it doesn’t remove the problem. Instead, let’s focus on removing the problem….
Determine what your problem is:
First, figure out what is causing your office to be cluttered. For example:
- What is the majority of the items cluttering your desk? Is it paper, pens (I’m guilty of this one), accessories, or something else?
- Are your filing cabinets or drawers filled to the top with items that haven’t been used lately?
- Are you surrounded by too many distractions?
- Is the information or resources easily available to you?
- Is your computer too cluttered?
Remove the problem:
Once we’ve determined what is causing the lack of focus, now it’s time to remove it. For example:
- If the majority of the clutter on your desk is paper, spend some time sorting through it. Determine what needs to be kept and what needs to be recycled, etc. Try not to hold onto things out of fear that you may need them “someday.”
- Remove items and furniture not in use. Furniture not in use can act as a catch all for items not in use (and clutter).
- If your filing cabinets or drawers have grown to be too crowded, and your stuff is now spilling onto your desktop, try reducing what you keep in your cabinets by half. And then half it again at a later date.
- If you find yourself constantly distracted try removing the distraction. For those in an office environment this can be tricky, so it may be time to pull out the headphones and listen to calming or soothing music at work.
- Keep TVs and distractions out of your office, but also keep your office out of your bedroom.Your bedroom should be your place for relaxing, and having work so near to where you sleep could actually cause you to have a few too many restless nights, including those where you end up staying up too late working.
- While decorations can stimulate inspiration, it can also be a source for distraction. If you find yourself being too distracted by decorations or excess furniture, remove these distractions.
- If the information or resources are not easily available to you, why? Is it that they’re buried under your clutter, so every time you need something you have to dig for it? It’s time to come up with some form of system, which we’ll touch on that next week.
- A cluttered computer can be just as distracting and draining as a cluttered desk. If you have to dig through folders to find a document, then you may also need a good system in place for your computer as well.
Once you’ve determined the problem and removed the problem, the next step is to prevent the problem from happening again. We’ll post a Part 2 to this post next week.
– Aly
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