Organizing your work life can increase satisfaction, productivity, and enhance your reputation.
To declutter your physical workspace, ask yourself three questions: Is it necessary for your job? Is it helpful for a joyful future? Does it spark joy?
Deep dives
Benefits of Tidying Up Your Work Life
Tidying up your work life can have significant benefits. It helps improve your work satisfaction by giving you a sense of control over your environment. Being organized leads to increased productivity as you spend less time searching for things. Additionally, maintaining a tidy workspace helps enhance your reputation, as tidy individuals are viewed as more intelligent, hardworking, and kind.
Tips for Organizing Your Physical Workspace
When organizing your physical workspace, consider decluttering items such as paperwork, excessive office supplies, and unnecessary personal items. Ask yourself three questions: Is the item necessary for your job? Is it helpful for a joyful future? Does it spark joy? If the answer is no to all three, consider discarding or donating the item. Additionally, be mindful of sentimental items, like children's artwork, and consider taking photos or scanning them to preserve the memories without the physical clutter.
Strategies for Decluttering Your Digital Life
Digital clutter, including overwhelming email inboxes, excessive apps on smartphones, and cluttered digital calendars, can be detrimental to productivity and well-being. To tackle digital clutter, limit the number of apps on your phone to only those that are necessary, and silence non-essential notifications. For emails, be selective about what you keep and consider using scanning or digital storage solutions. Additionally, establish a manageable folder organization system and strive to keep your digital calendar focused on meaningful and essential activities.
Effective Meeting Practices and Decision Making
Meetings can often be unproductive and time-consuming. To declutter meetings, focus on essential discussions, decision-making, and idea generation. Only hold meetings when necessary, ensuring there is a clear objective and a well-prepared agenda. Keep the number of participants to a minimum and limit meetings to no more than 60 minutes. Additionally, be proactive in decluttering decision-making by eliminating unnecessary choices and focusing on higher-stake decisions. Building a high-quality network based on genuine connections is also vital, prioritizing meaningful relationships over size.
When you think about decluttering, you probably think about your home life, and cleaning out your junk drawer and closets. But there are also ways to declutter your work life and tidy up both its physical and digital aspects.
My guest today explains the art of practicing minimalism in your professional life in a book he co-authored with organizing expert Marie Kondo. His name is Scott Soneshein, he's a professor of business and management, and his book is Joy at Work. Scott and I begin our conversation by unpacking the benefits of keeping your work life neat and tidy, and then move into how to do this in regards to your physical workspace. Scott shares three questions to ask yourself when you declutter your office to help you decide which items to keep and which to throw away. We also take a useful aside into how to throw away your children's artwork with less guilt. We then move into how to declutter your digital life by cleaning up your email inbox and smartphone. We end our discussion with several areas you may not think of in terms of clutter, but probably need some tidying up: your activities, decisions, network, and meetings.