Are you an organized person?
A client of mine, let’s call him Ben, was feeling anxious when we first met. He admitted to not being the most organized person even though he was many years into his practice. He had never taken the time for it and it had all finally caught up with him.
Ben had sticky notes all over his desk and multiple notepads that he was using. This system was not working. He knew he would write things out but he could rarely locate where he had written things. There was a severe lack of process. He wrote things down thinking he would remember where to look later, but by the time he was ready for that information he didn’t know which notepad it was in and spent additional time searching for it. The same thing happened with notes written on stickies – there were too many to search through, leading to further inefficient time use.
It was critical to bring some order to Ben’s physical space. We discussed a few strategies that worked best for him to clear his workspace and they were implemented over time, but we couldn’t stop just there. His digital space was also cluttered.
Ben had a bunch of documents saved randomly on his desktop and had trouble locating what he was looking for when he needed it most. His email also didn’t have any order – everything was inbox only, there was no use of folders. We needed to work through ideas to implement systems for decluttering his digital space as well.
Once there was order brought into these spaces, Ben felt a sense of organization and relief – all that clutter has been contributing to a lot of his anxiousness.
Take a look around your workspace and desktop.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Is your workspace cluttered?
Do you know the purpose of the things on your workspace?
Are there any unnecessary things on your workspace?
Is your desktop cluttered?
Do you know everything that is on your desktop?
Are there any unnecessary things on your desktop?
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