Thursday Seeds | Clear the Board

Things that should be done nightly:  Clear your desk and clear your computer desktop.

Why?

• It keeps you more secure, no prying eyes on what you are working on until you are ready to discuss, divulge, collaborate, or mandate.
• It keeps assumptions down for the passers by who think they saw something but saw it wrong.
• This way you control your narrative: when it is looked upon, what the context is leading in, and how it would be perceived.
• Personal items in a negotiation situation can later be used as leverage. Think of the episode in Suits where the painting that makes the High character think of his mother and it’s used against him by a competitor that was once his boss.
• Same character in Suits, get under his skin?  Touch his signed basket balls without asking or mess with his record collection that spans the long wall of the office. #leverage
• Electronic paper trail… if everything is electronic, you can work almost from anywhere that there is power for your portable device. It also leaves room for intricate electronic work for the gaming world or complicated Science and database patterns. (Think Divergent movie where they are looking at the human genome on a 3D monitor of sorts) Too woo woo? Too bad! We aren’t dreaming big enough regarding science in my opinion.
• With everything clean and clear, there is no place to hide things. It adds flexibility to office space as each person could set up anywhere. 

Perhaps there are some that would think this could be a draw back. Sometimes massive projects need to be unpacked and stay unpacked for a series of time. It would take too long to pack and unpack bags and mountains of data that needs to be available at a finger tip’s notice.

Think Crime fighters and CSI.  Massive story boards are required to dig deep into the details to pull out the research and seeds that lead to the solving of a mystery or crime. How many times have you seen the story boards with mug shots trying to discover the patterns in the movies?  Some of them even place their story boards in the closet to keep them from prying eyes until they can find quiet blocks of time to work on their project.

Pack rats and piles of books and papers can cause diversion to the true narrative. They can hide in plain sight the true work that is going on. This won’t work for the OCD. They will mess with the pattern EVERY TIME! (Watch out, if I’m not one, I’ve been trained by one, my mom.)

Sometimes if you pull things apart though, you see them from another point of view that can lead to new ideas or thinking. That’s when breakthroughs happen!

What if you clean your desk nightly and THAT is when you get the breakthrough idea to pursue the next morning?  Priceless!

-OR-

You give yourself the illusion of starting fresh with the project  is just the attitude energy needed to push through the resistance threshold of “fake till you make it” actually working out to be the truth!

-OR-

The reveal of a weakness in the armor that gives a project member just enough humility to realize that “we are all in this together” attitude that lingers in the piles of clutter.

See what you think, Try it out. One way or another, these are the things that can make or break relationships with team members and partners.  Who are you? Who is a part of your early training?

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