- thank you Alex Osterwalder – flickr
My earliest memory of visiting the Akron Beacon Journal offices was the look of books and papers everywhere. All surface areas seems to be filled with papers. Where did they sit to actually write, or to make notes, or to organize their materials?
How can you organize all the parts of your new business unless you have a place that feels clean and orderly, just waiting for you to unleash some great new idea! So where does that space come from?
One Desk for Communications – One Open Work Space for Creativity
One idea is to keep one desk for communications. This includes your computer, your phone, your notes about calls to return and emails to send. Those notes can stay stickied to your desk, computer, bulletin board.
A second desk or table or even a door positioned horizontally over two two-drawer filing cabinets can create an open work space where you can create. If you are working on a proposal, a presentation, or even a workbook, this open space will accomodate your writing pad, sample forms from other resource places, ideas from notes you wrote down last week, pens and squeegie toys. Maybe you bring your laptop with you, but you avoid looking at email or social media. This space then is totally dedicated to the project at hand. No other work to pull your focus.
I have known professionals who take all of those things and head for the nearest library; same result – all your materials are collected for the project at hand – easy to stay focused.
Some years ago we had a lovely foreign exchange student from Russia. She was so focused on the project at hand, she could walk over to the table in our family room, push aside the other magazines, books and papers, and create a 15 inch square clean space, and start her homework. I always admired that ability. Not me! I need the clean table to write my book.
