Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life – Marie Kondo, Scott Sonenshein
New age minimalism for everyone.
Documents(Physical and Digital)
1. The pending ones
These are the ones that require future action. Think of outstanding bills and things like proposals that must be reviewed.
2. The ones we MUST keep
Most workplaces will have things that are required by law—these might be long-term contracts or legislation.
3. The ones we WANT TO keep
These might spark joy or be valuable for other purposes.
Important Decisions
Gather all the medium-stake and high-stake decisions that you currently or will soon face.
Look through your pile and put the high-stakes ones to one side. These must be kept!
Now you’re left with the medium pile. It’s time to find out what is worth keeping.
Again, ask yourself those 3 important questions.
In addition to this, you should also ask yourself: Is this something someone else can do better or cheaper? If so, delegate the task to someone else!
Also, think, does this need regular involvement and thought? If not, then try your hardest to automate these decisions!
Tidy Up! Decisions To Make
Most of our decisions are ones made with little effort or focus, however, other decisions can be high-stakes and require intense thought and then there are the medium-stake decisions which fall in between and are the ones we are likely to put off as they aren’t as easy to make.
When tidying your decisions follow this process: Forget about the small ones, organize the medium ones and reserve your energy for the large and important ones.
Categorizing Everything
Make clear but simple categories that work for you. If you are a designer, maybe break everything down by client and then have a master admin folder for general bits. If you do a lot of ad-hoc work, maybe a date-type filing system would be best. Ask yourself: How do I approach my work, and how can I simplify how I obtain the things I need?
Email Personality Types
There are usually 3 ways we approach our emails: all of which can lead to problems.
1. Those who stay alert
These are the people who stay alert for inbound emails.
2. The spring cleaners
These are the people who purge their inboxes occasionally.
3. The accumulators
These are the people who let emails accumulate and then rely on the search functionality.
A Messy Environment
According to psychologists, messy environments reduce our focus, tax our brains, and make our overall working lives more difficult. In addition to this, the “Pygmalion Effect” suggests that tidy individuals are more likely to be seen as ambitious, intelligent, and kind—all qualities that subsequently lead to better performance at work.
Why Are We Not Clean
Tidying up can sometimes feel like a never-ending process. We swing between moments of having a tidy environment to a chaotic one. Why can’t we seem to tidy and keep it that way?
You need to ask yourself whether you really want a tidy workspace based on your own initiative or because external factors require it.
Books: The Tidy Way
Books can provide us with knowledge and inspiration but can also become a barrier to tidying.
Gather all your books into one space and ask yourself those 3 earlier key questions: “Does it spark joy? Is it needed for work? And will it lead to future utility?”
If you find you cannot answer any of those questions, then it might be time to let it go!
The 3 Traps: Overearning
It can be easy to fall into the trap of doing more work than we should. It can be so troublesome that psychologists have coined it “Over-earning”.
We tend to invest lots of energy into things that don’t really matter. We might originally undertake a task to achieve a specific objective, but we can lose sight of that we have achieved our goal and instead try to maximize whatever we can get.
The 3 Traps: Urgency
Instead of making time to dive into focusing on one task, we instead jump from one seemingly urgent task to the next. We work on auto-pilot and complete assignments based on what has been deemed urgent instead of important tasks. What usually happens is that most tasks become urgent when they are not, and it is no surprise that we feel overwhelmed and suffer negative consequences because of that.
Taking control of Your Emails
To begin, consider the three questions we discussed above when deciding what to do with an email.
Delete anything that does not fulfill the criteria, and then begin organizing the remaining ones.
Have a reasonable number of folders, but not too many. Categorize the folders into different sections.
This should be done on a daily basis. Clean up your emails whenever you have a spare moment!
Pending Box
Regularly maintain a box – whether it be physical or digital – for things which are pending. This is your place to put things when they don’t have a place yet. Think new documents – do not just put everything here though! It is instead a short-term stop-off for documents.
The 3 Traps: Multitasking
Multi-taskers tend to be among the least productive people at work. Research suggests that by multitasking, you could be decreasing your productivity by as much as 40 percent. We can only think of a limited number of things at once; take on too much, and you are likely to end up doing a few things poorly rather than one thing especially well.
Taking Control Of Your Schedule
1. Identify your ‘core tasks’
These are your central, ongoing activities that justify your existence at work.
2. Identify the ‘project tasks
These are the kind of tasks that have a discrete beginning and end.
3. Identify the ‘developmental tasks’
These are the ones that help us learn and grow such as reading, training, and attending conferences.
Getting Started
Before you get started tidying up, it is a good idea to have an effective plan in place.
Visualize your ideal work life.
Know where everything belongs.
When you encounter anything, ask yourself:
- Does it spark joy?
- Is it needed for work or play?
- Any future utility that it provides?