I have been following a dozen productivity type blogs like zen-habits, life hacker andunclutterer for a while. They all produce sound methods of de-cluttering your life and organizing your thoughts. They all have a common theme in the form of a system. All the methods of being productive drive us towards a system. This system has no particular name.
People end up with a bunch of systems after a while, one conflicting with another, namely a system for emails, a system for research, a system for organizing paper, a system for organizing a week. Suddenly we face a clutter of systems.
What we need is not a quiver full of systems but a culture. A culture of organizing and staying organized. My industrial engineering background introduced me to the world of 5S. It is a Japanese culture marketed as a system. I introduced it in a manufacturing environment and was met with exponential success.
Bogged down by numerous co-worker derived systems of email and file management and Franklin Covey’s task management, I was facing a clutter at my office desk that may have looked organized to the untrained eye. That till I did a 5S sweep at my desk.
The five steps of 5S are:
- Seiri (Sorting)
- Seiton (Set in Order)
- Seiso (Sweeping/cleaning)
- Seiketsu (Standardizing)
- Shitsuke (Sustaining)
This creates a culture of clutter free productive work. After almost two years of implementing 5S, my desk is free of stuff I don’t use everyday, my PC desktop is clean of all but the three necessary icons, my documents folder is organized, my inbox is always clean, I still don’t take more than 2 hours to respond to an email etc.
In the course of the next few weeks, I will write about individual steps I took to clean up my work place. Hang Tight!
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