“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure”.  Ever hear that?

How about this one?  “A neat desk . . . is the sign of a well-ordered mind”.

Here’s another: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

 

You can see by these statements that different people have varied opinions about how tidy their desks ought to be. And you can also see that the degree to which someone’s desk is tidy or cluttered is unrelated to that person’s ability to organise their thoughts.

It’s what is known as a logical fallacy - the idea that a work area that appears to be disorganised to you means that the person to whom it belongs is also less productive.

Think about your own desk. Have you ever left some papers on it overnight or over the weekend only to discover that the office cleaner had been in and “tidied” it up?

 

What is clutter?

To the neat-nick or minimalist, clutter is either something that is out of place or which shouldn’t be there at all. Think of your typical sitting room. Those which have a “woman’s touch” tend to have pillows on the sofa. Usually, the colour in them is picked up in the fabric of the furniture.

A neat-nick would want them to be in exactly the right place. A minimalist might want them to so closely match their surroundings as to be practically invisible. To extend this generalisation to men, it’s likely that if they had their way, there would be no pillows at all. To them, such accessories would be clutter.

Why is that?

Being careful to avoid sounding sexist, woman see things like pillows as finishing touches to a room, whereas men view them as “in the way”.

Let’s turn the tables.

Many men, though certainly not all, have a workspace at home. Often it’s in the shed or the garage. Some have a workshop.

Here are found numerous tools, wire, wood, metal, and all manner of other bits, some of which are stored in little compartments contained within a larger box, but most of which appears to be strewn across the entire workspace.

Those who are not inclined to DIY activities would see all of it as so much junk, whereas the owner of the “junk” would see it as valuable materials that could be used in a future project.

Indeed, it has been quipped that a man doesn’t need to be reminded every six months to finish some task that he began some while ago. So clutter is in the eye of the beholder. The person to whom the “clutter” belongs is less likely to view it as such. And that’s an important point.

 

Now that we understand what clutter is, or isn’t, we can think about how it affects our job performance.

 

How does clutter affect your job performance?

The question that immediately arises is, to what extent is your ability to concentrate is impaired by your surroundings?

If you’re desk is a disaster area, but you’re the most productive person in your company, then apart from raising the eyebrows of all who pass by, it probably doesn’t make any difference. You will just need to keep your door closed or perhaps put a tablecloth over your desk in your absence if you work in a cubicle.

The same can be said if you supervise such a person, after all - the goal is to get the work done; not be nominated for the Clean Desk of the Month Award.

However, if you spend any time at all looking for things because everything is buried under everything else, then you have a problem. Not only are you wasting time in your futile search, but you can’t concentrate on your work if you have to wade through a forest of documents, reading things as you go along, looking for it.

You may not agree with how your situation has been described, but that doesn’t change the fact that that is what it is.

 

Clutter is a distraction

There’s something else that you need to think about, and that is that even if you can easily find your work, your ability to concentrate on it can be impaired the by the distraction of seeing the clutter in your work area.

How would you know?

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you felt compelled to “get organised” so that you could do your work? If you find yourself wanting to do this often, then it means that your surroundings are a distraction. Most people have to do this periodically, though once you have a routine in place, it should be a rare occurrence.

The felt need to rearrange furniture, or the actual need to file papers, is evidence that you’re being distracted and probably by a measure of the chaos that is immediately around you.

That, however, is not the only distraction.

The act of reading other things also takes your mind off what you’re doing. You know this to be true.

How often have you started going through your papers looking for one thing only to find something interesting, or something that you had been searching for the other day; and instead of carrying on with the hunt for your original document, you instead embark on another project with the new-found piece of paper?

 

Mental space

Another thing to think about is the fact that physical clutter can clog your mental space.

This is difficult to describe.

If you’re a student, then you’re used to being surrounded by books. If you’re an engineer, then you’re used to being surrounded by tools and various materials that you use to make things. If you’re a musician, then you’re used to being surrounded by instruments or musical scores. If, on the other hand, you’re a serious student and you find yourself in an environment that’s noisy from the use of tools and people shouting back and forth to one another, you will be distracted.

And if you’re accustomed to working with machinery, you’ll probably find it odd if you’re asked to speak softly. It’s when you have to concentrate harder on your work because the surroundings aren’t conducive to what they should be that they are a distraction.

When you remove distractions, you create mental space, and mental space is needed to think.

If you’re finding it difficult to think, then chances are that this is the reason. There’s something in your physical space that’s interfering with it.

Naturally, the answer is to remove the clutter - the distraction(s) - so that you can concentrate.

Further evidence that you need to remove clutter is if you’re running from pillar to post. In this case, the clutter consists of activities and interruptions. Instead of being allowed to focus on one thing, you’re constantly being yanked from one thing to the next.

 

Hoarding

Hoarding is more serious. It’s one thing to save for a rainy day; quite another to save for the end of the world.

If you’ve hung onto stuff since before ante-diluvian times, then you need to consider under what circumstances specifically you would have a need for any of it.

Answers such as, “You never know” carry more truth than you realize. Perhaps the answer should be “You’ll never know”, and that’s because no one else knows either.

Let’s think of some extreme examples: floppy disks, reading glasses that are three or more years old; computer files explaining the latest online marketing techniques that are four or five years old; email messages that are as old as Google.

You get the point.

One suggestion is to keep whatever you have used in the past year. Then, of what’s left, ask yourself what you’ll probably use in the coming year. Discard the rest.

The thing you have to guard against is letting the clear-out take on a life of its own. The goal is to de-clutter your workspace so that you’re more productive. It’s not to create a part-time job reorganising the clutter.

It’s been said that Americans, for example, are the only ones on earth who have to hire storage facilities in order to have a place to put things that they’ll probably never use again.

Apart from family heirlooms, or toys and clothes for the grandkids, this doesn’t make much sense; but if you have filing cabinets full of files that date back more than a few years at most, you’re guilty of the same thing.

All decisions you make about what to keep and what to get rid of should be easy. If it isn’t, then you’re either making it harder than it needs to be or you’re not serious.

 

Do a bit at a time

Unless the clutter around you has gotten so bad that it has paralysed your brain, you should remove it a bit at a time.

You see, if you concentrate on it too much, then it can get on top of you. You can experience overwhelm; and while there may be a lot of it, feeling like you’ve bitten off more than you can chew won’t make you more productive.

It won’t feel cathartic either.

And that’s the goal. To make yourself feel better so that you can increase your productivity as a result.

 

 

If you need to learn more about being organised and effective – call Bob Hayward now