The Visual Work Area and Stress

Look around your desk. Look around your work area. Use this checklist to help you make your workplace a low-stress zone. Each time you answer “no,” plan to adjust the situation.

• Is the overall picture you see one that makes you feel organized, in control, well aware of where everything in your work life is?
• Are the things you see closest to you the things you use most often?
• Is anything that you use often missing or unecessarily out of reach, somewhere you must go to get it?
• Is the area where you most often write and think free from visual distraction — items and papers that remind you of other things you might be working on?
• Could you map each location of your work area and describe it’s purpose in business terms to someone who visited you for the first time?
• Are your tools, surfaces, and equipment clean, free of dust, and in working order?
• Can you apply these same values to your file system and the things you use that are outside your visual workspace as well?

Things out of place or out of reach steal time from us, seconds here and there that we often need. We’re aware of that when we’re under a deadline and need to walk across the room to get paper for the printer next to our desk. We’re aware when we need a document in a pile that’s accumulated rather in a place with others like it.

We’re less aware of the stress of a dusty desktop or a pile of clutter nearby. Yet they cause similar distruption to our thoughts. Each time we see that smudge on our computer screen a quick thought interrupts saying I ought to clean that. A document that is tied to a deliverable will remind us whenever our eyes fall on it. An old list of things to do will make us wonder whether it holds something we might have forgotten.

An orderly workspace sends a signal to our unconscious that we’re in control. It also tells those who work with us that they can trust our work to get done in an orderly fashion. Even more importantly, an ordered workspace keeps us moving forward without distractions helping us make more time to do the things that need doing.

Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding manager.–Perfect Virtual Manager

Liz Strauss