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Desk Cleansing

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A cluttered desk might be the sign of a busy mind, but it’s also hard to work when your laptop is balanced on a pizza box, an old magazine, and five unlabled CDs. For those of us that work from home, the problem is even greater. Desk clutter expands, filling the areas around the desk, and even other rooms. Do you really want to mess where you live?

Between the west coast storms and the post-holiday slump, you’re not going to get any work done the next few days, so why not take some time to get your act together and clean up your desk?

Can’t find the motivation? How about public shame? Take a picture of your cluttered desk and post it to the Cluttered Desk pool on Flickr. Or post it to your blog and tag it deskclutter. Or do both. Leave a comment here with a pointer to your desk pics, if you’d like.

Here’s how mine looked.

Dirty Desk (by Kalsey)

And after cleaning.

Clean Desk (by Kalsey)

Comments

Dave Hoff
January 4, 2008 6:41 PM

Nice! I'm doing the same tomorrow.

Adam Fortruna
January 5, 2008 8:50 AM

Is that an Ikea Galant desk? I was looking into getting one of those. How are you liking it?

Adam Kalsey
January 5, 2008 10:56 AM

Yep. It's nice, although it would be nicer if I had room in my office for the side extensions.

This discussion has been closed.

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