Do you inhabit a messy workplace? While your desk contains clutter of your own making, most offices have communal spaces that can quickly get out of hand. What is the best approach to keeping these common areas clean?
The Konmari Method, created by Marie Kondo, is mostly devoted to helping people organize their personal home space. However, in an interview with the web site Quartz Marie Kondo shares insights into keeping office spaces clean.
“My suggestion would be for co-workers to tidy up their workplace together. There are many benefits to organizing your desk space, including increasing your efficiency by spending less time looking for the things that you need, being able to more quickly prioritize your workload, and even feeling better as a result of working in a clean environment.”
Read the other questions and answers for Marie in this short article on Quartz.
“Public institutions, such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, and athletic fields, are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are community gardens and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Nonprofit organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructure when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, clothing, and other consumer goods.”
“Why should I go to all the trouble to empty my email inbox?”
“I understand the resistance to to-do lists, and the complaints about keeping them. I’ve noticed a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that most to-do lists are incomplete lists of still un-clarified “stuff.” Looking at them creates as much stress as they might have relieved in the first place. Typically, what people have on their lists (if they have them at all) are things like “Mom,” and “bank,” and “marketing VP.” It’s great that they have captured something that has their attention, but there are still critical decisions to make with some critical thinking about that content.”
For most people cleaning and tidying mean the same thing. Both are about bringing order to a space. However, there is a subtle but important difference between the words that can be transformational. In fact, it is not possible to clean successfully without tidying first!
“Imagine for a moment the perfect organizational system. One that supported and enhanced the work you do, telling you exactly where to put a piece of information, and exactly where to find it when you needed it. … I believe I’ve developed a system for organizing digital information that meets all these requirements. After several years of introducing it to a wide variety of people, I’m confident that it works. In this post I will attempt to show you how.”
Efficient Librarian 