Messy Desks Cost Workers Two Hours Of Lost Time A Week

citynews ^ | December 28, 2006

[Logophile]

If you really want to waste time, maintain two messy desks, one at the office and one at home. That will guarantee that you never can find anything.

[amchugh]

There was a guy on NPR recently (yes, I listen to NPR) touting his new book about the power of disorganization. He claimed that you would often find action items that needed doing while searching for lost stuff, and that effective people in organizations tended to have cluttered desks.

That said, their is definitely an upper limit to effective disorganization. I find that if I work very hard to file the easily filable homogenous stuff, and leave the heterogenous stuff a mess, it works pretty well.

[Chode]

DayTimers...!!!

i live and die by my pocket size i got in 1983, and the standard size i got about ten years ago. no excuse.

on the other hand, the desk is a psychological problem...

[perfect stranger]

Wow! Do all those machines work?

Mine is like an operating room compared to that! LOL

Click to see the photos on my Freeper home page.

[3catsanadog]

It seems that Office Depot is trying to scare people into buying their organizing stuff.

-PJ

You gotta point there, buddy; I'm just glad this wasn't a government funded study that my hard earned tax dollars helped finance.

[stainlessbanner]

Mash here for the Adventures of Action Item Man

[muawiyah]

Massive amounts of time get wasted by mind-numbed employees who think (erroneously) that organizing stuff you will shortly throw away is useful work.

Three piles ~ one involves new stuff, one involves stuff being worked on pretty soon, and one is for the stuff you're done with but haven't thought about disposing of.

Set aside 10 minutes a day to throw stuff in the trash.

All of this stuff will be rationally organized by time of entry.

[muawiyah]

I had a case where one of the big mailers had provided us with a three foot deep pile of BS ~ most of it had been submitted earlier in House committee hearings where their expectations were not realized.

I kept that stuff organized together and out of my general correspondence.

They didn't try that again.