Clean your space

During a busy workweek, I will confess that various stacks of paper can build up on my desk. There will be pages I printed or flyers from my kids’ schools. Sometimes my kids’ art work winds up there too. I leave sticky notes for myself. There will be books from people I’m interviewing and — if it’s been a really busy week — coffee cups.

If it has been a busy week, it can be tempting just to flee the mess on Friday. But unless your office is really cluttered, it probably won’t take more than 5 minutes to set things close to right. When I take 5 minutes to throw away the trash and stack up papers I’m keeping so I can actually see my desk top, I feel much more like the weekend is ready to start.

Maybe you will feel the same. So about 5 minutes before quitting time on Friday, make a quick sweep of your work space. Dump any obvious trash. Take any dishes back where they belong. You don’t need to sort through all the papers unless that’s a task you’ve assigned yourself. Instead, just put them in a very neat stack (or perhaps even a folder) so you can go through them later. Corral any pens into a pen holder, and feel free to shove any desk ephemera (extra chapstick? A ponytail holder? That piece of conference swag your colleague dumped on your desk for unknown reasons?) into a drawer or basket.

Would it be better to fully organize things? Sure. But there’s no need to make the perfect the enemy of the good and most of us aren’t going to embark on a major organizing project on Friday afternoon. The goal is to leave your desk in a state such that your desk top will be fully visible when you walk in Monday morning. (Or, if it’s your home office, if you happen to walk in there for a shift over the weekend.) We’re going for calm and clear. The new week will no doubt have clutter of its own. No need to burden it with last week’s too.

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