Find Joy At Work

Wanting to feel joyous at work? A delightful 2020 book by Marie Kondo, tidying expert and best-selling author, and Scott Sonenshein, an organizational psychologist has loads of timely advice. In this week’s blog, I’m offering the core lessons and steps I absorbed from “Joy At Work. Organizing Your Professional Life,” in hopes it sparks joy in your work—both present and future.

Tidy With Commitment

To reap the rewards of this book, you must embrace Marie Kondo’s core philosophy that true joy, calm, and peace comes from tidying up. Also, to tidy up your work area requires time and emotional commitment. While the popular Netflix hit show “Tidying up with Marie Kondo” shows families taking weeks, even months, to tidy their home, in Kondo’s experience, tidying up our work space could take place within a week, or less. Commit to 20-minute intervals over several days.

Joy at Work liberally cites the research explaining why we ought to tidy our working area (and she provides an excellent organizing system using the five-step KonMari method—well worth trying). The most memorable incentives for my commitment included:

• Gaining back time we lose when looking for lost items

• Feeling calmer and more centered, on purpose vs triggered and busied by mess

• Feeling more harmonious—more joyous from creating boundaries with work. From reading this book, I now pack my entire laptop off my desk, every night and schedule time for bliss daily vs. weekends only.

Tidy Your Tech

Joy at Work advises how to reduce your emails, apps, and how to organize your documents, and the latter using a minimalist approach. Determine which documents and reports to keep by asking a few questions: Do I need this document to:

• Get my job done?

• Guide or inspire future work?

• Spark joy within?

If you answer no to all questions, then delete it. And because your desktop extends your workspace, organize it well with only the things you need right away. Maintain perhaps three files: Photos. Documents. Joy.

Tidy Your Activities (and Social Media)

For true joy at work, we must also tidy our schedule, priorities, and our time. (What a lovely idea, right?) Kondo writes: “By discarding tasks that don’t spark joy and adding those that do, you will make your work much more rewarding.” To get there, Kondo recommends:

• Avoid saying ‘yes’ to every outing or meeting. Manage meetings to become standing only, shorter, and with an agenda (and only attend the ones where you bring true value).

• Create clean space on your calendar to think deeply—and to spark creative ideas. (“This type of thinking tends to be our most creative because we’re not constantly judging ourselves,” Kondo writes.)

• Do joyous activities every day. (Yay!)

• Spend less time on social media—strive for fewer followers and social media outlets. Go for a smaller network of meaningful connections vs. gazillions of strangers.

What I loved about this book is it:

• Remains applicable even when many of us work from home—nor does it feel horribly dated given the publishing happened prior to COVID-19.

• Shares Kondo’s own vulnerability with her own personal struggles from overload, stress, and busy work which can extract joy from all of us.

• Provides case studies showing vs. telling us that organizing our work space and work life can drive big changes to how we feel about ourselves, our work, and improve how we communicate, too.

Kudos to the authors for an incredible, timely, and beautifully written book!