Office clutter is a common enough sight in many work places. It certainly is in mine…. on my desk especially. It cannot be helped sometimes. No matter how often I try to organise my desk, there simply are days when no amount of organisation seems to work! My desk drawers are filled to overflowing with many training materials, books, brochures, user manuals, product guides, price lists etc. that everything else has to go on top of my desk.
I have two business card holders. One seems to belong to everybody else because they gravitate to it whenever they need to find somebody’s contact information. The other one contains paper clips, key chains from several business trips, fridge magnets, some colorful marbles and a few months’ worth of change. Both card holders are precariously perched on top of a stack of old ring binders.
I also have 3 coffee mugs from different corporate events that are too tall to fit inside my desk drawers. They sit against the cubicle divider. I filled them with novelty pens, letter openers and my chopstick collection. It was (in my humble opinion) a cool way to “dress-up” my work area. As my clutter grew however, all attempts at personalising my desk were rendered useless amidst all the chaos.
Everything changed when I won a charming little fishbowl in an office raffle. My workmates were sure the fish would die from stress if I put it in my cubicle. They gave me a week! I didn’t care what they said. I have been visiting the raffle display corner and have been staring at that fish for a few minutes every day since they announced the raffle. I didn’t even know at the time what kind of fish it was. It wasn’t particularly pretty, kind of yellowish blue (hard to imagine yes, but that’s how it looked to me). The round tank itself was incredibly clear and very easy to look into, unlike others that looked as if they were made from thick and ugly prescription glasses.
The very next day after I won I cleaned out my desk of all the dust traps that I have been keeping. I put all my books into four storage boxes and had them moved to the stockroom. When all that’s left on my desk were my laptop and my 3 decorative coffee mugs, it was finally ready to welcome my new-found motivation for a clutter-free desk, my new fishbowl! I certainly didn’t want my fish to think it fell into a sewage tank! I wanted to give it a nice, fresh-looking environment!
Over the next few weeks, I covered my old cubicle walls (boring grey upholstery) with beautiful underwater-motif fabric, added miniature plant jars in the corner and had some lighting fixtures custom-made for my tiny aquarium. I also bought two smaller replicas of my fishbowl, filled them with lollypops and toffees and placed them on the other end of my desk between the coffee mugs.
Oh, and the not so pretty fish was a blue tang (remember Dory from Finding Nemo?)…. It gradually turned the rich blue that Dory was in the movie.
I have since installed a bigger fish tank in my apartment, with a variety of fish in it. Watching the fishes flash in and out of the rocks and the water plants gives me a peculiar sense of peace and contentment. It sort of refreshes my tired brain. Nothing however compares to the feeling that I get each morning when I greet Darius (Yes he’s a hunk so I can’t have named him Dory) as I begin my day at work and each night as I leave for home.
You might be wondering about the clutter.... Well I have managed to keep them to the barest minimum. My priority now is to keep Darius’ environment as pleasant as possible. He’s in a much bigger fishbowl now. The little guy turned me from a slip-shod to a fairly neat and mindful person, it’s the least I could do, really.
