Posted: October 30, 2009

By Catherine Cantieri
The phrase "office clutter" usually conjures up images of endless piles of paper, binders stacked on top of each other and receipts sticking out from under a keyboard. But while the physical aspects of clutter are the most obvious, there's another level of clutter that can severely undermine your ability to get the important things done.

All the papers in those desktop piles, all the reports stacked up, all the PDFs and whitepapers on your hard drive, every newspaper in the pile you've been building for months now - they all represent information, and they all require reading.

It's so easy for information to pile up and overwhelm you, especially given the rapid pace with which it enters every office and the variety of potential sources. You've probably already got a substantial information backlog that's growing every day. Developing a plan to manage it will require some rather tough choices, and some math.

The first step is to grasp how long it would take you to read every unread thing in your office. Using an estimate of 15-20 minutes per newspaper, 30-120 minutes per journal, 20 minutes a day per 10 blog subscriptions and 40-60 seconds per printed or screened letter-sized page, try some quick multiplication to determine how many hours of reading you'd need to do to catch up.

You probably came up with several days' or weeks' worth of reading, and that's just for what's currently in your office. By the time you finished doing all that reading, more information would have arrived. Unless your boss is willing to give you an all-reading sabbatical, you'll need to cull your information down to what truly adds to your work.

Here are a few format-specific guidelines for reducing your information backlog:

Newspapers: Once you've set a newspaper aside for more than 24 hours, it should be recycled. Not only is the paper already old news, a new paper has probably arrived in the meantime to add to the pile.

PDFs: Whenever you download a whitepaper or eBook PDF, spend 30 seconds or so looking through the first few pages of it to get a sense of its relevance and usefulness, and feel free to delete it if it doesn't meet your criteria.

Journals: If your field has a significant research/development component, keeping up with journals is both necessary and beneficial. If you don't travel much, consider using online versions of your field's journals and regularly searching for your particular interests. If you do travel, there's no better time to catch up on your journal reading.

Blogs: If you've been following blogs for more than a few months, you know which ones offer the best information and which ones just recycle it. Manage your subscriptions in an RSS feeder to keep your blog load to a reasonable size, and to present the information in one window on your screen.

Once the backlog is manageable, it's time to make regular appointments for your reading. If reading the news every day is vital to you, set aside 20-30 minutes to do just that. If you get two to three technical whitepapers every week, set aside the time needed to read them in a focused state.

If your schedule is already full, you have to make the call over how important this information is to you, and whether something else can go to make room for it. Putting information aside for "someday" or "in my spare time" only leads to visual and informational clutter.

When you're making those decisions regarding how much time you're willing to spend processing information, try to keep in mind that information has no real value of its own. Its only value lies in how much it can enrich your work and assist your performance. Like all physical things, information has to "earn its keep" by being of use to you. Remember, it's there to serve you, not the other way around.

Catherine Cantieri's business, Sorted, helps other businesses get organized. Visit the Sorted blog at www.get-sorted.net/.