It is the second Monday in January and that means it is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. And my desk definitely was in dire need of a real good cleanup.
When we moved in July, I claimed the little nook at the window in our bedroom for my desk. I find this the perfect spot because I get a lot of natural light and the cats usually sit or sleep on the bed behind me. After Rich and I spent two years with our desks in the same room, due to space limitations back to back, and, thanks to the pandemic, too often participating in different video conferences at the same time, this now is an amazing situation.
Rich’s desk right now is in our little space on the second floor. I also call it his Batcave and hardly walk up the steep stairs these days. In any case, our desks are in totally different areas and we can even close a door in between (as in: woohoo, our apartment is big enough to have doors between rooms).
While I have a laptop, I prefer my desktop computer and sitting at my desk. The only problem was that I put more and more things on the desk. Yep, I am excellent at piling up documents and other stuff, but not great at tidying up. Recently though my apparent nesting phase has made me see said paper piles more and I have had much more of an urge to get rid of them. So I used today’s National Clean Off Your Desk Day to tackle my desk.
The Cleaning Process
Today I first emptied my desk and properly cleaned it (as well as my desktop computer) with lots and lots of glass cleaner. I then went through all the documents I had collected over the last months. I trashed most of them. There really isn’t any reason to keep old medical bills that have long been paid. Apparently, I am also a great collector of bank cards. The ones that have long been invalid. I cut them in half and threw them away as well. The same happened to several old membership and staff cards. Eventually, I went through my pens and removed the empty ones. God knows why I collected empty pens or empty packaging or …
Finally, I decided what I actually needed and wanted on my desk. Very little, it turned out. I don’t use a great number of pens or fun stamps. So all unnecessary things went elsewhere in the apartment. I put documents I still need in a specific folder. We have one drawer in the living room for stationary.
The Result
I love how empty my desk now is. It only contains the most important things. Like my desktop computer as well as its keyboard and mouse. I keep my Content Planner there because I regularly use it. On the little shelf underneath there are now a small pencil case, my glasses (both reading and blue light ones), one hand cream and one face mist, as well as headphones.
I still have one of my external hard drives one the floor because that is the easiest way to connect it to the computer. And there is only one outlet in the desk corner so there are quite a few cables. We also use it to connect our smaller bedroom TV to electricity.
Now I am very pleased with my cleaned and much emptier desk. It motivates me to use it even more. Hopefully I won’t clutter it again.