What's On Your Desk

It is not surprising that when you clean up, you seem to find things you think you have lost - like the keys that you find buried in the crevices of your couch; or that postcard from a friend that released itself quietly from the magnet and floated under the fridge. Sometimes cleaning up has rewards. When I was a kid, I once found $7 in the pocket of a coat I had stuffed under my bed - and I felt very rich.

Cleaning up, or more accurately, clearing up can also have negative consequences. You know what I mean - that pile of papers that you sorted out three weeks ago has now been scattered into various files and folders. You are sure that you put the letter from a long-lost relative in that pile, but now you can't find it. It's sort of like when I was a teenager. I would have piles of clothes on the floor of my room. To the casual observer (ie: my parents) it was a right-royal mess. But I could find any item of clothing within a very short time because I knew exactly where everything was. Clean up the mess and I wouldn't have been able to find a thing.

I try to keep my desk at work reasonably tidy. In my younger days I used to be able to push all the mess to one side and do my homework on the other. But not anymore. I have evolved such that I actually require a clutter-free desk. I recently cleared a whole lot of unnecessary stuff off my desk at work - like multiple pen holders, excess notebooks, old and irrelevant papers, those little yellow sticky notes that seem to get everywhere, old paper clips and used, mangled staples.

Actually, it is interesting to note what sort of things people put on their desks. I work with someone who tends to put as little on his desk as possible. I like that minimalist approach - if you don't need it, get it off the desk. I have noticed others (not necessarily in my group) who seem to put as much on their desks as possible - family photos, nick-knacks from the conference they attended in 2001, trinkets from work, gifts from suppliers, little clay models their kids made in 3rd grade, commemorative mugs, logoed clocks of all descriptions, mountains of tissue packets and so on. Actually, until very recently I was inadvertently building a tower of used disposable coffee cups that I seem to have collected over the weeks (yuk).

What's on your desk?