Apply Marie Kondo’s approach to decluttering and tidying to your professional life to enhance your productivity and up your happiness quotient at work.
It’s hard to imagine organization expert Marie Kondo struggling with a messy desk, but she illustrates her battle with clutter in her latest book, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life, written with Scott Sonenshein.
Early in her career, Kondo worked at a staffing agency in corporate sales. She wrestled to keep up with her colleagues to meet sales goals, even while working long, frenzied hours. One day, she realized that her space was disastrous. After an hour of decluttering, all she left on her desk was her phone and computer.
“I could find the documents I needed right away,” she said of the transformation. “There was no mad search for things just before I dashed off to a meeting, and when I came back I could launch right into the next task.”
It hit her just how vital a clean workspace is. She started to feel happier at work, and began helping her coworkers tidy their spaces, too. Whether it’s physical or nonphysical clutter, we pay a high cost when we fail to maintain order amid chaos, Kondo writes.
Clutter at work is a common problem that plagues many individuals, regardless of their work environment. Kondo shares several eye-opening data points about the loss in productivity that occurs due to inefficient, untidy work practices. The average office worker loses two hours and 39 minutes a week in ineffective meetings and has an average of 199 unopened emails in their inbox on any given day. Almost half of office workers report misplacing a significant work item, whether a file folder or a USB drive, once a year. Research shows that the time spent searching for lost items comes out to an average of one workweek per year per employee.
But the argument in favor of tidying goes far beyond productivity statistics. A huge theme throughout the book is that examining and assessing aspects of your job—both tangibles and intangibles—allows you to uncover purpose in your work.
“Tidying can help you get in touch with what you really want, show you what you need to change, and help you find more joy in your environment,” Kondo says. “Every job is essential. Finding meaning in our daily tasks makes our job worth doing and this leads to joy.”
Check out three key takeaways from the book to bring a greater sense of purpose to your work life:
01. Organize your digital assets to increase efficiency.
Sonenshein, an organizational psychologist, makes the point that it’s easy to fall through the trap of disorderly digital files, because the consequence isn’t obvious until it’s too late and storage space runs out. He advises defaulting to discarding items and making files and emails prove their value instead of assuming they should be saved. One way to think about this is to ask yourself, “Why should I keep this?” instead of “Why should I get rid of this?” Neither your desktop, nor your desk, should be regarded as a “dumping ground,” but as a tool, he says.
He also writes that having a handful of “intuitive, primary folders” is the best way to stay organized; after all, dozens of folders are hard to manage (something I’ve learned firsthand). He recommends just three: current projects, records (for policies and procedures you often refer to), and saved work (files from past projects that can help with future ones). “The usefulness of your folders will improve as you consistently place similar files in the same place and keep only what you need,” Sonenshein writes.
When it comes to email, despite the pressure to stay on top of notifications, checking email frequently is a productivity killer. He suggests holding “email office hours”—time periods blocked off to read and respond to emails. After all, “A single email interruption can require twenty-six minutes to pick up where you left off,” he warns.
02. Examine your tasks and your time for a more peaceful schedule.
On average, we spend half of our workday on job duties and the other half on meetings, interruptions, and nonessential tasks, Sonenshein writes. “Activity clutter comes from the things we do that take up precious time and sap our energy but don’t make a meaningful difference to our personal, professional, or even company’s mission,” he says.
He writes about one woman, Christina, who led a startup under a large nonprofit organization and had a schedule booked six weeks in advance. She started to cancel any appointments, such as certain recurring meetings, that she didn’t think were worth her time. Soon, she was able to revive her personal life, with time to devote to working out, making dinner, and seeing friends.
Let go of the guilt to say “yes” to everything, Sonenshein advises. One trick to deal with the social pressure is to respond by saying that you’ll think about it when someone asks you to take care of a project outside your typical scope of responsibilities. A short delay before making a commitment helps us to “feel more empowered to say no to tasks we don’t enjoy and yes to tasks we do,” he writes.
03. When it comes to networking, choose quality over quantity.
Research shows that we can manage about 150 meaningful connections, Sonenshein writes. But scroll through LinkedIn, and you’ll see people with twice or three times that number. While a large network translates to a greater possibility that you could find someone to help you with an unposted job opportunity or other question, there’s a big difference between “having a network full of valuable contacts and having a network full of valuable contacts truly willing to help,” Sonenshein says.
Take the time to evaluate your contacts—the ones you have business cards for and the ones you’re connected with on social media platforms. Keep only 1) the connections you need for your job, 2) the connections you think can help you grow professionally through new job prospects or valuable career insight, and 3) the ones that bring you joy and whom you would be happy to see or help, Sonenshein says.
When Kondo evaluated her network, she noticed that she couldn’t remember so many of her contacts that she felt it was dishonest to stay connected with them. Outside of family members and people who were essential for her work, just ten contacts remained. “I was stunned at how many names I eliminated,” she writes, “but afterward my heart felt much lighter, and I was better able to nurture those relationships that I had chosen to keep.”
