I find myself in a constant battle against clutter in my workspace. Most of the time I am letting the other side win.
After writing an earlier post about writing away problems I realized I hadn’t applied this to my own problem with a messy desk area. I didn’t have to move a muscle. I opened up Google Docs to my freewriting document and began writing about what I saw in front of me.
What types of things are out of place? Why were they left where they are? Where was I storing them before? What was stored within arm’s reach that wasn’t out of place indicating I likely didn’t need to store it so closely?
With only 15 minutes of this process I discovered specifically what was wrong with the flow. For example, I was storing things in the top left and right drawers - within easy reach - that I don’t actually reach for that often. The things piling up on my desk were the things that needed an immediate storage place.
Behind me is a tall stack of wide short drawers that I keep other things in I use often, but of those, I was keeping the ones I use most often near the top not the bottom where they could be within reach from my desk chair. This was perfectly rational if I were standing when I access these drawers, but swapping them down to the lower drawers makes it a snap to spin around and retrieve them or put them back in their place.
Meanwhile, I was also developing a shopping list for a few orgainzational items that would be required for the new setup.
You get the idea.
Two lessons were learned. One, don’t organize things the way they should be organized - do it the way you need it. Abandon any preconceived conventions or old paradigms and figure out what you need. Maybe, as in my case, the general office supplies like pens, paper clips, etc do not need to be in the top drawer. Keep the objects you actually have your hands on most in the handiest places.
The second lesson of course is that probably no problem can’t be managed or sorted out with a little free writing.
Do you have any success stories with freewriting or organization that you could share in the comments below?
