This morning, when I came up to my office, all I wanted to do was spend the day sorting paper and organizing things. Oh, and I wanted to scream.
My desk this morning. AGH!
My desk is a little bit of a nightmare right now – stacks of papers, bills willy nilly, a random ruler jutting out across my notes. If I could, I’d just throw it all away, take out a clean notebook, and begin afresh.
But well, I don’t feel like having creditors calling, and I would probably regret trashing the notes on the research project about a small Virginia town that I’m doing for a client. Still, some days.
I do take one thing from my messy desk, though – a reminder that my self is much the same these days – a bit disheveled, disorganized, a little frantic. I’m still settling into a new place and routine, and that settling takes time.
So here’s what I’m going to do to clean up my desk and ease my spirit a bit.
1. I’m going to take an hour this morning for yoga. Nothing calms me or makes me feel more centered than a good yoga practice, and here in this new office, I have space to lay out a mat and move through some asanas.
2. I’m going to take an hour and clean my desk and organize my files. I need to find a place for everything and come up with a system for all my projects.
3. I’m going to make a point – as Tayari Jones suggests – of readying my desk for the next day each evening. I had been fairly faithful in doing this before, but then, well, moving meant that piles of things were everywhere. So back to that today.
This past weekend, my friend Sarah picked up a Feng Shui book at the local library. Neither she nor I knew much about the practice, but after reading a bit, she suggested that perhaps the central tenet – and feel free to inform me fully if you’d like – was that we make our spaces beneficial and calming to our spirits. That idea appeals to me so much . . . and so off I go, for some yoga and then some organizing. . . I expect by Noon my spirit – not to mention my writing space – will be much more soothed and productive.
What methods do you use to keep your spirit and your workspace calming? Regular filing? Nightly clean-up? Feng Shui?