Clutter: who needs it? Evidently, some reptilian part of my brain thinks I do, which is why there’s piles of the stuff surrounding my desk like a small, irregular fortress. If nothing else, at least I’m protected from apex predators. Thanks for that, lizard brain. Unfortunately, it also means I’m disorganised, unfocused and uncomfortable, as well as inaccessible and unprofessional in appearance. Something needs to be done.
On closer inspection, I don’t even know what half of this stuff is. In fact, a good portion of it actually belongs to other people, and how it ended up here is anybody’s guess. I mean, take this stack of papers – they’ve got nothing to do with me, but it seems that someone thinks I need to sign off on them. Even if that was the case, couldn’t they have just emailed me? It’s 2019, for crying out loud.
Here in Melbourne, new office fitouts don’t tend to incorporate too much physical storage space, except where it’s strictly necessary. My point is that a lot of offices these days are virtually paper free. My workplace, it seems, hasn’t received that memo. If it had, I probably wouldn’t get quite so many paper dumps, and additionally, the little storage I have would be more free to house things like… I don’t know, this projector stand that’s for some reason propped against my chair.
Speaking of trends in interior design for offices, Melbourne seems to be leaning away from individual desks and towards a more free-form approach to layout – and, again, my workplace has missed the notification. I wonder if, perhaps, the latter might lead people to be more accountable for where they place their misc items.
It’s a bit unintuitive, but think about it – if you put something down on a desk that you know to be someone else’s domain, it then becomes their responsibility to some extent. But if you put it in a more communal space, everyone’s going to complain about it and, eventually, complain about you for putting it there.