Detox Your Desk

Declutter Your Life and Mind

Theo Theobald, Cary Cooper

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781841127873
• eBook ISBN: 9781907293979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Why is there never enough time in the day to do all the stuff you want to? Why does your in-tray just keep growing? Is it alive? Written for the time-starved and terminally untidy, Detox Your Desk is the perfect antidote to pressure cooker of the modern office. It's flat out but you still fell like you're not getting anything done. And no wonder. It's hard to do anything meaningful when you're swamped by piles of paperwork and endless 'to do' lists. Detox Your Desk helps you fight back by purging your system office toxins, so you can take control of the everyday stuff and calmly field whatever lands in your in-tray. It starts with the physical clearing out of all the rubbish that litters your life and then gives you practical tips to help free up your thinking. Detox Your Desk puts you on a ten-day programme that'll result in a tidy workspace and a clear head. All of the changes are easy. Stick with them over the long term and you'll change the way you work forever, giving you more time and a greater choice in every area of you life. This you big chance to get on top of your workload and start to enjoy work and life again. You'll soon be the most efficient and effective person you know!

SECTION THREE

THE DETOX PROGRAMME

THIRTEEN

DAY ONE

Week one

This is the start of your daily detox programme. Each day will begin with a ‘change of the day’ for you to consider, and there will be three further actions to take, usually along a theme. These actions build over the course of the two-week programme, each adding a little to your detox.

We’ve talked about the importance of having time to reflect on your actions, so each day before you go home, take a minute to think about what’s happened and record your thoughts in a Daily Detox Journal.

As preparation is the key to success in so many of our work-based activities, most days will involve you thinking about and planning what is to follow in the morning. This shouldn’t be too difficult and often you will be able to complete your prep on the way home, just by considering what the next day will hold.

CHANGE OF THE DAY

Go for a walk. If you’d normally do this anyway, then alter your route so that you discover something new. If it’s not a normal part of your routine, you’ll need to think about where you’re going and when. First thing in the morning can be terrifically energizing, but, equally, an after-work stroll can help to de-stress you; a further option is last thing at night, which gives you a chance to reflect on the day and consider what went well.

The physical exercise you’re taking is important, but just as significant is what you do with your mind when you’re walking. Have you ever witnessed someone walking their dog and talking on their mobile phone at the same time? This clearly defeats the object: if you’ve gone for a relaxing stroll, to be diverted by either work or some other aspect of your life means that you’re missing the point. Your walk today is partly about getting things in context. You’re lucky if you live in the country, because the ‘force of nature’ is all around you, but even if you’re a city dweller, there are many things to marvel at which we don’t normally take the time to see.

Do your best to clear your mind of the usual pressures that preoccupy you; forget about work and paying the bills, and picture yourself as just another small part of the universe. Thinking about this vastness can make us feel tiny in the overall scheme of things, but at the same time it is a fantastic way of putting any troubles we have into perspective.

Make a real effort to carry the benefit of this with you, because the problems we face are, in reality, very small; it’s our perception of them that makes them an issue. If you can maintain a healthy perspective on this then you are much more likely to achieve what you set out to do.

If you didn’t wake up this morning with a slight feeling of excitement then you’re just not doing it right. Today is the start of a new way of working, a new design for life, which will make you more efficient and effective; who knows where this could lead? - maybe a promotion, or it could simply be that you’ll go home on time with the satisfaction that you did a great day’s work.

Remembering the daily energy cycle that each of us goes through is important as you prepare to embark on your detox. The reason is that you will need energy and resolve if you’re going to be successful. Have you ever started to have a clear-out at home when you’ve been feeling a bit lacking in energy? What usually happens is that you come across a drawer full of bitty things or a box of photographs and soon become absorbed by the contents rather than focussed on the task. It becomes hard to make ‘eject’ decisions; in the end you elect to keep everything, but just straighten it up a little. The exercise is completely pointless because detox is about freedom, and you can only achieve that if you’re prepared to ‘let go’ of the detritus that drags you down.

ACTION 1

Before you leave the house, drink half a pint of cold, fresh tap-water; set a reminder on your watch or phone so that it beeps at lunchtime and at 5 p.m. to alert you to do the same thing on both subsequent occasions.

This is all part of feeling good and staying alert; there’s an increasing body of evidence that suggests many of us are permanently dehydrated, and studies in schools have shown that children have lower attention spans if they’re in this state. Setting the reminder will force you to think consciously about this action for today, but after that, it’s up to you to sustain it because, when we’re changing habits, our motivation is much stronger if we ‘learn’ the benefits for ourselves.

ACTION 2

When you arrive at work, make a conscious effort to break with your early morning routine. If you start the day with a coffee, don’t; if you ease yourself in gently with a chat, don’t. Apart from the need to make this a different day, there is an overriding necessity during your detox to be aware of everything you do and the enemy of active consciousness is routine. Carry on doing things the same way and soon you achieve ‘autopilot’ status, the kind of dreamy state that most of us live our lives in, the one where we stop questioning what we do and just do it.

Instead, go straight to your workstation. Before you sit down, take a deep breath and survey the scene with a critical and objective eye (you can use two if it helps).

ACTION 3

The first thing to tackle in the process of detoxing your desk is your desk! Most people’s desks contain a combination of three elements, which can be categorized as ‘personal’, ‘work’ and ‘rubbish’. All sorts of things fall into the rubbish category, from the bits of Blu-Tack or bent paperclips you mindlessly play with while on the phone, through to chocolate wrappers, credit card receipts or Post-it notes (whose noteworthy value ceased long ago).

‘Personal’ also has a variety of guises; mostly it’s comprised of photographs of loved ones, maybe even your spouse! Occasionally it might turn out to be some lovingly crafted artefact from a younger member of the family, often constructed of clay or raffia, the kind of material that sheds bits of itself over time. Reminders of ‘happier times’ are a popular favourite, like images of holidays or of a windswept beach with the dog - we even came across a fully reconstructed beach, housed in an upturned shoe-box lid, complete with sand, shells and plastic figures, which really is going a bit too far.

Everything else falls into the work category, so folders and files are part of the picture, but so too is the ‘equipment’ that allows you to function. Common hardware includes computer keyboards and monitors, but also calculators, desk diaries, clocks, pen-holders and desk-tidies (which are a contradiction in terms).

The first part of the clearing process is to take everything off the desk (except things that might be ‘hard-wired’ like monitors and keyboards). You can put it all into a box, sort out a drawer to store it temporarily or make some neat piles on the floor around you. As you go, recognize the rubbish for what it is and bin it; if there are re-usable resources (like the Blu-Tack, for example), you need to find a place for them, so put them back with the unused stuff that’s hiding in a packet in your drawer. This is the only bit of ‘sorting’ that needs to be done at this stage, so if it takes you more than 10 minutes, you must be doing something wrong.

Next, you need to think about today. Check your diary and your memory for what needs to be done and write down a list of the files, folders or other paperwork you’re going to need, then carefully select them from the pile.

Everything else, unsorted rubbish, personal stuff and work-that’snot-relevant-to-today stays in one place (you might find an old A4 copying paper box a handy tool). You’re nearly done now; all that remains is for you to complete your ‘day map’ for instructions, then put everything you’ve selected from the box as critical for today’s tasks in one place, any place, but most definitely not back on the desk (in a separate drawer maybe).

By now you might be thinking this is a bit of a palaver, but it’s far from that. In these simple steps (that should have taken no longer than half an hour at the most) you have cleared your desk completely in preparation for what will ‘flow through’ during the day, you’ve made a plan for how to use your time with a day map and you’ve developed a method of monitoring what’s needed and what isn’t in an average day. If you’re left wondering about that last one, it’s as simple as this: everything you thought you were going to use today is in one place. If things change or you hadn’t anticipated the need for one file or another, you’ll have to go to your ‘box’ to get it, but as you do, your consciousness will be raised and it’s much more likely as you go through this process each day, that you’ll get better and better at selecting what’s needed.

And just in case you’re becoming concerned that you’re now dragging a box of miscellaneous stuff around with you, don’t worry; over the next few days you’ll find a series of instructions on how to solve this temporary situation. In fact, one of the critical elements in making this detox successful is to take it a stage at a time, and to try and make sure that no single set of tasks takes too long; otherwise you’ll fill your day with detoxing and get fired for not doing your job.

RETROSPECTIVE

Detoxing is a learning process. You are literally learning a new series of habits, a revised routine to improve your efficiency, and, in order to do that effectively, there needs to be a bit of time set aside each day to reflect on what’s happened.

Take 10 minutes out before you go home to think about a couple of things. Firstly, how did you feel this morning about the process of detoxing and has that changed through the day? What might have altered your opinion and can you make things better tomorrow?

Next, look around you; what’s different about your workspace now? How has it altered from the way it was when you arrived? Make a mental note...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• Introduction
• SECTION ONE - ANALYSIS
• SECTION TWO - METHOD
• SECTION THREE - THE DETOX PROGRAMME
• INDEX