Temporary Membership in the Clean Desk Club

I recently came across a list of anxiety-lessening acts, simple things you can do every day to relieve stress. Most of the time, this stuff is bogus but there were some practical suggestions on this particular list so I paid attention.

The writer singled out clutter as a generator of stress. She pointed out that when we leave a bunch of "stuff to do" lying around undone, we react to it in less-than-positive ways. One of the suggestions was to judge the time it takes to do a small task—file a bank statement, let's say. If that time is 60 seconds or less, do the task.

This eliminates much of that stuff that piles up until tomorrow.

Here's another way to tackle the same problem, one that I have used for years.

When I was the marketing manager for The Countryman Press, there were times that the piles of correspondence, catalogs, sales materials and books to send out for review threatened to engulf me. Bob, our sales manager, sat in the same office space as I did, and had to deal with the same issue. In fact, given the cyclical nature of publishing, everyone in the company got crushed at times.

One day, it seemed as though everything on my and Bob's desks needed to be done yesterday, and all of it was screaming for our undivided attention. Just before lunch, Bob went down to our warehouse and came back with an midsized, empty cardboard box. Without looking, without sorting, without any organization whatsoever, he swept every piece of paper or memo or spreadsheet into the box, making one big pile.

He put the box on the floor next to his chair, picked up the top piece of paper, dealt with it, and then moved onto the next.

Bob dubbed it his "box-o-stuff" method. It didn't take long before I was in the warehouse looking for my own box. You know what—it worked. Without all of those piles screaming at me on my desk, I moved through my paperwork faster. I got a lot done. I was calmer.

And by the time I reached the bottom of the box, I got a reward. The stuff at the bottom turned out to  be unimportant, and could be thrown away or recycled.