At Act.fm, we’re building a tool for helping you manage your goals via social pressure. One of the goals I put down is to organize my desk area. I’ve found that I experience significant benefit from cleaning my desk (and my e-mail inbox!). A clean desk puts me in a good mood and gives me the confidence that the rest of my life can be similarly tamed.
It took about an hour to do it today, after letting things pile for probably two weeks. Here’s the before:
And here’s the after. I even decorated my wall a bit 
Much better! Yes, I have a plaque, it’s of the one patent I have (jointly) in my name. To continue with the organizational vein, over the weekend, my girlfriend picked up for me Desk It by JStory, a weekly checklist. You can see it in the bottom left corner of the “after” picture.
It’s pretty self-explanatory – an adhesive list of things you would like to do each day of the week. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single office (office Monday, meetings on the road Tuesday, office Wednesday, Starbucks Thursday, and home Friday) so I can’t just stick it on my computer, but its untraditional design is really useful. As a checklist person, I appreciate the way the days are separated so for any given day there aren’t an overwhelming amount of things to do.
That’s the story of my desk – a never-ending fight for order. Maybe you have some tips for organizing your life you’d like to share?
