The Art of Manliness - #626： How to Declutter Every Aspect of Your Work Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you

00:00:11.020 think about decluttering, you probably think about your home life and cleaning out your

00:00:14.200 junk drawer, your closet. There are also ways to declutter your work life and tidy up both

00:00:18.260 its physical and digital aspects. My guest today explains the art of practicing minimalism

00:00:22.180 in your professional life in a book he co-authored with organizing expert Marie Kondo. His name

00:00:26.180 is Scott Sonenschein. He's a professor of business and management and his book is Joy at Work.

00:00:30.720 Scott and I begin our conversation by unpacking the benefits of keeping your work life neat

00:00:34.140 and tidy and then move into how to do this in regards to your physical workspace. Scott

00:00:38.120 shares three questions to ask yourself when you declutter your office to help you decide

00:00:41.240 which items to keep and which to throw away. We also take a useful aside to how to throw

00:00:45.300 away your children's artwork with less guilt. We then move into how to declutter your digital

00:00:48.700 life by cleaning up your email inbox and smartphone. We end our discussion with several areas you

00:00:52.620 may not think of in terms of clutter, but probably need some tidying up, including your activities,

00:00:57.180 your decisions, your network, and meetings. After the show's over, check out our show notes

00:01:01.040 at aom.is slash declutterwork. Scott joins you now via clearcast.io.

00:01:16.160 Scott Sonenschein, welcome back to the show.

00:01:18.620 Thanks so much for having me back.

00:01:20.160 So we had you on three years ago to talk about your book, Stretch, Unlock the Power of Less.

00:01:25.120 You got a new book out and it's called Joy at Work, Organizing Your Professional Life. And with

00:01:29.860 this book, you teamed up with Marie Kondo, who is famously the Japanese lady who has gotten

00:01:36.020 millions of Americans to pick up their tchotchkes in their house, asking, does it spark joy? And

00:01:41.240 helping people become more tidy. And I'm curious, how did you, how did this, how did this partnership

00:01:47.580 come about to take Marie's ideas about minimalism and keeping things tidy and applying it to the work,

00:01:53.540 to our work lives?

00:01:54.320 Well, my research and writing has been on the power of less and how can we live a meaningful life and

00:02:01.380 have a successful career when facing all kinds of constraints and challenges. And in Stretch,

00:02:07.700 what I do is I explain that many of our greatest accomplishments and most satisfying moments

00:02:12.500 happen when we are making the most out of our resources versus trying to acquire more and more

00:02:18.140 things, money, time, information, and so on. And Marie had learned about Stretch. It had come out

00:02:24.120 in February, 2017. And in March, she had gotten in contact with me and wanted to learn more about

00:02:30.060 how the ideas in my book were consistent with what she was doing in her work and what some of the

00:02:36.460 science would say about her tidying perspective. So she invited me to her house. She was living in

00:02:41.440 the San Francisco area at the time and had a nice conversation for a few hours over some nice Japanese

00:02:46.860 tea and talked about how different aspects of her work were very complimentary. And at the end of

00:02:52.140 that meeting, we decided we would go ahead and write a book together about work.

00:02:56.500 Well, that's a cool story. Because when I first saw it, how did that happen? I'm always curious

00:03:00.360 when you had to see these unique partnerships show up. So she reached out to you. And so when

00:03:05.920 you started looking at this, when you started organizing the book, you started thinking about

00:03:08.660 this book together, you started off talking about the benefits of our work life when we keep things

00:03:14.660 tidy. So she has her philosophy and you have this scientific research to back it up. What are the

00:03:21.060 benefits of our work life when we keep things tidy there?

00:03:23.640 Well, I think the first thing to realize is that there's real damage that comes from

00:03:28.080 messes, especially in the workplace. So surveys show that about 90% of Americans believe that

00:03:33.880 physical clutter has harmed them. And it turns out they're right. We know from physiological studies

00:03:39.320 that having physical clutter around increases cortisol levels. It makes us moody. And then beyond

00:03:45.420 the physical, I mean, there's just all kinds of other messes at work that we're dealing with,

00:03:50.460 drowning in emails or poorly organized meetings. Just the annual bill in the US for poorly organized

00:03:56.900 meetings is about $400 billion a year in lost productivity. So when we tidy, we get things

00:04:02.060 organized and we end up with several important benefits. So the first and most important one

00:04:06.100 is we just feel better. So tidying is about making intentional choices about what our environment

00:04:12.380 looks like, what activities we're doing. And when we do that, it gives us more work satisfaction

00:04:17.240 because we feel more in control over our work. And we know from the research that this sense

00:04:23.680 of control is one of the most fundamental human motivations. Beyond feeling better, we're also

00:04:30.180 more productive because we're just not wasting our time looking for things, whether they be physical

00:04:35.060 things or things in our digital space. Our time is better spent in meetings and the rest of our days.

00:04:41.240 And then lastly, I would say our reputation improves. And we know from perception studies that people who

00:04:47.760 are tidier are viewed by others as more intelligent, harder working, and also kinder.

00:04:54.180 Gotcha. You know, that idea of it makes you just feel better. I was a research assistant for a

00:04:58.680 professor in law school and he was, you know, sort of really old school. And so when I researched things

00:05:04.520 online, he'd want me to print off webpages and like he collected in. So instead of having stuff on his

00:05:09.480 computer, he just had stacks and stacks and stacks of paper everywhere. And you go into his office and

00:05:14.820 you had to kind of like navigate like it was a small maze. I just felt really, I don't know, I felt bad.

00:05:21.140 It's like small and cramped and it wasn't a pleasant experience going into the office. I always try to

00:05:25.000 like go in there only when I had absolutely had to go in there.

00:05:27.500 Well, as a professor, I hear where he's coming from. And I'd say that most of my colleagues are

00:05:33.640 like that too. We tend to be some of the worst hoarders out there, not just of paperwork,

00:05:38.580 but especially with books. And actually one of the things I did when I first started deciding to

00:05:43.780 work with Marie's, I said, I really have to fully embody her perspective to make sure I can, you know,

00:05:50.380 go ahead and write a book with her. So I went through my office, which probably looked very similar to

00:05:54.920 the office that you were just talking about when you were a research assistant. And my problem was,

00:05:59.520 was books. And I had, I don't know, at least 400 or so books out there. And I threw them all on the

00:06:05.340 floor and I picked each one up and I, you know, started reflecting about, you know, whether or not

00:06:09.840 this book was still important to me, if it was still sparking joy, if it was still useful. And I

00:06:13.360 realized that so many of these books were just relics of the past. They were previous projects I did or

00:06:19.080 other activities or interests I used to be into that no longer were important to me. And I ended up

00:06:24.160 getting rid of about half of my books and donating them and making my space a lot more organized. So

00:06:29.080 I, I hear you on, uh, on, you know, some of those, uh, professorial offices. I mean, they, they tend to

00:06:34.940 be, uh, some of the worst offenders, I think.

00:06:37.900 Well, I've, but I've heard that, you know, I've read research where it says that messy environments can

00:06:41.680 actually make us more creative. Is there anything to that?

00:06:44.540 Well, yeah. And that's a, that's a, that's a good question because of course, uh, a lot of my work

00:06:48.280 and a lot of other people's work really depends on, on creativity. And there is this, this notion

00:06:53.340 or this popular belief that messiness just inspires and sparks creativity. Now, in fairness,

00:07:00.260 there is a, there is a study of, uh, that's done that shows that messes can create some creativity,

00:07:06.460 but you know, some of the, you know, the way that the study is, is done is it's, it's looking at

00:07:10.640 differences between what they call a orderly room and a disorderly room. And what they mean by that is

00:07:16.600 where things are actually put in the room, as opposed to the sheer quantity of what's in the

00:07:21.800 room. And one of the things that you get when you tidy is you're making intentional choices to keep

00:07:27.540 things that you love in your work environment and on your calendar. And that puts you into a headspace

00:07:33.120 that really is conducive to sparking creativity because it increases positive emotions. We titled

00:07:39.140 our book joy at work because this method is meant to bring about more joyful feelings throughout the

00:07:45.100 work day. And as a positive emotion, uh, joy broadens our, our thoughts and expands our, our

00:07:52.000 creativity. What is, so you mean, so tidying definitely makes you feel good because whenever

00:07:56.240 I'm feeling bad, you know, I'm not in control. Like typically you want to do is tidy and it feels

00:08:01.320 great, but I also noticed I've used it as a procrastination tool. It's like if I, something's

00:08:05.560 hard and uncomfortable, I had to do with work and I really don't want to do it. I find myself

00:08:09.140 organizing my desk drawer. How do you prevent tidying? Because it does, as you said,

00:08:14.060 feels good to becoming a tool to procrastinate with. So with, with tidying, what you get is a

00:08:21.560 process that when you do it once, you really don't need to do it again. Marie likes to talk about how

00:08:27.680 people who physically tidy don't rebound. And what she means by that is they don't end up with a lot

00:08:34.340 of clutter that would provoke them to have to start this process all over again. On the non-physical side,

00:08:40.620 for example, I talk about what you can do with your inbox and people who have a tidy inbox are not the

00:08:48.020 people who are constantly checking their email and distracted and trying to move things into

00:08:54.160 different folders as a way of avoiding work. In fact, one thing that you can think of is that clutter

00:09:00.500 is the ultimate tool for procrastination because instead of doing what we're supposed to be doing

00:09:07.200 in our work, instead of engaging with the work that we love, we end up cluttering ourselves,

00:09:12.800 whether it be just having more things around, having more stuff on our calendars, going to more

00:09:18.640 meetings as a way of not doing the work that we should be doing. I mean, there's this notion that

00:09:24.400 for some people, email has become their job when the reality is, is email is simply a tool to get

00:09:30.460 their job done. So it's the clutter itself that tends to be the tool of procrastination.

00:09:35.060 And once you develop a system for tidying and you do it once, there's little maintenance that's

00:09:40.880 needed. So it doesn't become this thing that you can always turn to and say, okay, let me reorganize

00:09:47.300 my desk and tidy it again. If you've done it once the proper way, you don't need to do it again.

00:09:52.740 Right. And so if you don't have to do it again and you want to procrastinate,

00:09:55.260 you got to find something else to do.

00:09:56.760 You got to find something else.

00:09:58.140 You can't use, oh, I've did something good here. All right. So you break, this book's broken down into

00:10:02.040 two sections on the how-to part. So they're very practical. And it's first is organizing

00:10:06.560 your physical space and then organizing your digital life. Let's talk about the physical

00:10:10.420 workspace. What type of things are we focused on here?

00:10:13.900 Well, in the, in the physical space, we're talking about things like books, paperwork,

00:10:19.320 and this miscellaneous category, which tends to be a lot of things. It could be office supplies.

00:10:24.480 It could be electronic devices or cords for those devices. Sometimes there's job specific items. So

00:10:32.060 maybe product samples or customer collateral, personal care items you might bring to the office

00:10:38.520 or working from home in your own home space that are in your workspace and then food. And so these are

00:10:44.860 the, these are the main physical, physical things that you would have in your, in your workspace that

00:10:50.020 you could tidy.

00:10:50.660 When you and Marie were working on this book, and I'm sure you like talk to people about what stuff

00:10:56.120 consumed, like what was the type of clutter, physical clutter that really caused a lot of

00:11:00.300 problems in people's physical workspace?

00:11:02.480 Well, I think paperwork is a, is a big one. There's this sense that people just want to hold on to

00:11:07.340 paperwork, but then I think everyone has their own idiosyncratic thing. So food items is a, is another

00:11:13.240 big one. Some people have pantries in their, in their workspace and have just a lot of, a lot of food.

00:11:18.280 Some of it well past the expiration date. Office supplies is another big one. I mean, how many

00:11:23.820 paperclips do you really need in your desk? Do you really need more than a handful of pens? But

00:11:29.460 some people would have dozens, if not more of these pens. So I think, I think there's, there's a lot of

00:11:34.900 variety out there, but I think the general themes are too much paperwork, too many office supplies,

00:11:40.120 and then something idiosyncratic, usually for, for a person, whether it be food for one person or

00:11:45.720 maybe some personal care items for another one. Yeah. Books are a big problem for me because

00:11:49.760 people, companies and publishers always sending me books and they stack up and then like, and I'm

00:11:54.980 always like, I should hold onto this. It's a book. But yeah, I sometimes I'll just have stacks and

00:11:58.880 stacks and stacks build up before until it becomes so overpowering. I have to just donate them all to

00:12:03.460 the library. Yeah. And you know, books, books again, too, like for, for me as a professor are really

00:12:07.720 hard, but then you realize that, you know, someone else can benefit from the book too. And so maybe it's

00:12:12.980 spoken to at one point, or maybe it doesn't even speak to you and you can, you can give it to someone

00:12:17.280 else. I'd say another, another thing that is probably worth mentioning is just the struggle

00:12:22.100 to that people, especially with kids have around sentimental items. And I know I struggled a little

00:12:27.980 with this one too, which is namely my kids artwork. And, you know, you could have artwork that goes back

00:12:34.280 10 years and you, you hold on to every, everything that your child's done and you're proud of it and

00:12:38.920 you should be proud of it. But people really have a hard time parting with those items. And those,

00:12:44.640 those stack up over time, especially if you have more than one kid.

00:12:47.740 I think there was like an onion headline where it was like, mom asks 30 year old if she, if she wants

00:12:52.960 folder full of middle school artwork. And I think every person can relate to that because I'm sure every

00:12:58.520 person's mom kept their middle school artwork. And they're like, why'd you, why'd you keep this?

00:13:04.420 Well, I thought you'd need it one day. It's like, I don't need this anymore.

00:13:07.040 Yeah. There's a, there's actually a study, really fascinating study with a, a simple trick

00:13:13.200 for when you're struggling with discarding sentimental items. What the study shows is

00:13:19.100 taking a photo of it makes it much easier to get rid of the physical relic. So obviously you're

00:13:24.900 taking a picture and that's taking up a little space, but that's far better than keeping the

00:13:28.900 physical item. So whether, if it's in the office, if it's in your home, taking a picture of that

00:13:34.380 sentimental item tends to give yourself permission to discard the physical item when it no longer

00:13:41.260 sparks joy for you.

00:13:42.380 Well, I do that with my kid's artwork. I'll take a picture of it. Cause like, you know,

00:13:45.760 kids, your kids make you stuff and like, here, I'm giving this to you. And it's basically the

00:13:49.200 same drawing that they've done over and over again. And you've collected like 20 of them in

00:13:52.760 the past week. And then if you throw it, you can't throw it away. Cause your kid's like,

00:13:56.340 why'd you throw it away? Did you not like my thing? So what I do is I take a picture of it

00:14:00.440 before? Cause I want to keep onto it. It's nice to see that or I'll scan it. That's another thing

00:14:04.280 I'll do.

00:14:05.040 Yeah. So those are all good tools and then you can surreptitiously throw it out and hopefully

00:14:09.560 they won't notice. Right. Put it back at the bottom of the garbage can. So with paperwork,

00:14:14.900 any tips there on, on keeping that tidy and clutter free?

00:14:19.040 Well, the reality is, is that most paperwork we simply just don't need to hold on to. Most things can

00:14:24.620 be digitized. We don't need to digitize everything. I mean, if it's, if it's not needed,

00:14:29.440 we go through a three-step process. So unlike the, the home where you can just ask, does it spark joy

00:14:36.560 and then decide if you want to keep it or not at work? And this is true for physical clutter and

00:14:41.120 this true for non-physical clutter as well. We basically go through three questions. You have

00:14:45.240 to ask first, is this item necessary for my job? There are some things we just simply have to keep

00:14:51.040 because they're part of doing our jobs. Two, is this helpful for a joyful future? And by that,

00:14:58.160 what we mean is maybe it will help you advance in your career or it will teach you something that

00:15:04.080 you want to know, but it's going to help bring about that type of future that you will find

00:15:08.740 joyful. And then third, does it all, does it spark joy? And if, if you answer yes to any of those three

00:15:15.040 questions, then an item is worth keeping. For a lot of paperwork, the answer is, is, is no to all three

00:15:21.340 of those. And those can be shredded or discarded. If you still need to keep it scanning, it tends to

00:15:26.980 be better than, than having the physical copy be there. And there's lots of, I mean, you can go

00:15:32.260 online. People have developed systems about digitizing your paperwork. Paperwork, if you need

00:15:35.560 to do that, where you just buy a scanner and then you scan it and it goes to like a digital inbox

00:15:40.140 somewhere. And you, it's there if you need it, but it's not taking up your physical space.

00:15:45.000 So physical space, pretty easy. So just like stuff that's cluttering your desk. So when you're doing

00:15:49.300 this, is this like, you said it shouldn't be a continual process. Like, how do you know when

00:15:52.860 you're done? Like, how do you know when you're, you're tidy enough on your physical space or even

00:15:58.280 this could apply to the digital space? Yeah. So what you've got to do is you've got to kind of

00:16:02.860 have your starting place. So kind of like your, you know, your, your first go at this and you've got

00:16:08.280 to do this in kind of a condensed time period. This is nothing, this is not a process where you're going

00:16:14.600 to spend an hour this week, an hour next week. There's a sense of having to put

00:16:19.240 everything in one place because a big part of the method is to realize just how much you have,

00:16:24.300 whether it be how much physical stuff you have, how many emails in your inbox, how many meetings

00:16:29.120 you go to every week. So you want to, you want to make these piles, either literally these piles or

00:16:33.820 metaphorically these piles. So that's, that's a process that has to be done in a condensed period

00:16:39.180 of time. So you go through that initial process of, and let's just take the physical space as an

00:16:44.560 example here. And you could spend half a day going through the physical process, going through books,

00:16:50.240 paperwork, miscellaneous stuff, and sentimental stuff. And then after that, as you go through

00:16:55.580 that process and you apply these three criteria we talked about, is it necessary? Is it helpful for

00:17:00.880 the joyful future? And does it spark joy? You're not only choosing what to keep, you're also teaching

00:17:07.080 yourself an important lesson about what you value, what you prioritize, how you're spending your time.

00:17:14.540 And this is a set of criteria that's going to stay with you, that when you encounter something in the

00:17:21.440 future, it could be a piece of paper, it could be a request to do something, it could be an email,

00:17:28.780 you're going to be able to more quickly and more accurately and more effectively apply these three

00:17:36.780 keep criteria and make the decision, is this an item or an activity that I want to keep? So after you go

00:17:44.920 through that first process, which is the most time consuming part of it, afterwards, you've internalized

00:17:50.680 these rules that make subsequent decisions so much faster that you never really have to go back and

00:17:57.920 do all of that initial work again. So it becomes second nature with practice, basically.

00:18:02.960 Yeah, exactly. What are you going for? Okay. So let's talk about the digital space because,

00:18:07.740 I mean, physical space, you can see the stuff that's in front of you, you trip over it.

00:18:11.920 So I think people get that, like they can feel the clutter, but your digital life can be cluttered as

00:18:18.260 well. What type of things, I mean, how has digital clutter changed the tidying game?

00:18:23.500 Well, it's changed a lot because as a lot of the world is moving online and digitally,

00:18:30.560 a lot of the clutter is naturally following through. So we've got overstuffed email inboxes,

00:18:37.720 hard drives that are packed with files and phones that are full of apps that are constantly chirping

00:18:43.980 and buzzing and beeping at us and just annoying and distracting us. So the bigger challenge with

00:18:50.840 digital clutter relative to physical clutter is storage space just seems endless. So it's so

00:18:58.660 tempting to just say, let me just keep everything. Why do I need to bother getting rid of anything?

00:19:04.920 Because I have more or less unlimited space. But the challenge is that that clutter creates

00:19:11.940 downstream effects. So for example, never deleting a file on your hard drive ends up cluttering your

00:19:19.520 file system. That makes it more difficult to locate documents that you need. Emails just take up a lot

00:19:26.620 of time and people just have a hard time deleting anything that when they need, when they actually

00:19:31.060 need an email that they should have kept, they can't, they can't find it. And phones by just constantly

00:19:36.260 having apps on it are just, you're just providing more reasons for the phone to be interrupting you.

00:19:42.080 And we know from the search that a single interruption from a phone, it could take as much as 26 minutes

00:19:48.220 for the brain to recover and go back to the place that it was at. So it's not benign to just say,

00:19:53.620 I've got unlimited storage space. Let me just keep all of this stuff around. All of those things turn

00:19:58.540 into distractions. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:20:02.280 And now back to the show. Yeah, I know when I first started using Gmail, that really changed the way I

00:20:10.320 used email because it was just like, oh, you can just archive it and then just pull up, like do a

00:20:16.380 Google search basically in your email inbox and find whatever you need whenever you need it. But then

00:20:21.160 like you have to start thinking like, do I have that? Is that, does that even a thing? Like you have

00:20:25.440 to start maintaining a file in your head, which can just cause a lot of problems.

00:20:30.560 Yeah, that's absolutely right. And at its extreme, I think the Guinness world record holder,

00:20:35.580 a guy by the name of Joey Manzala with 4.2 million emails in his inbox, but you don't really need to

00:20:41.680 be Joey to have a problem. I mean, I think a lot of people struggle with digital clutter because

00:20:47.220 they don't, they either, I mean, you end up with different ways that people handle this. There's

00:20:52.480 people who just will never process an email. It will stay in their inbox. And if they need to find

00:20:58.180 something, they'll have to rely on the search function, which could help a little, but they

00:21:02.480 still are going to end up with a lot of hits to have to go through. So for example, let's say

00:21:06.840 you're working on a PowerPoint presentation for a client and you search for deck and you end up with

00:21:13.500 your home improvement project popping up. So you've got issues like that. And then you've got issues of

00:21:19.280 sometimes you want to be able to look at a thematic set of emails, which is also difficult if you're

00:21:25.220 simply keeping everything. But at the other extreme, you've got people who've got just

00:21:29.860 hundreds and hundreds of folders that the folders themselves become a problem to just try and think,

00:21:35.940 what folder does that go in? Or, you know, what folder is this email that they need to go

00:21:40.580 reference in? So what we recommend here is to have a pretty limited set of folders. So no more than 10

00:21:47.400 folders. There's lots of, you know, the research on digital processing shows that even when you

00:21:54.580 provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to someone that one system is more effective than

00:21:59.140 the system they're using, they're just very resistant to change. So I think in this, in this

00:22:04.480 aspect of tidying, we're a little more flexible than in some of the other aspects. But what we do

00:22:08.860 recommend is limiting it to about 10 folders that are meaningful to you. For me, I basically have

00:22:14.760 three main folders. I have a current project folder. These are things that I'm currently working on and

00:22:20.040 I'll have a sub project for each current project I'm working on just a records folder. These are email

00:22:25.800 records that I need. And then just to save work folder where I would have other other things that I

00:22:30.600 need to save. And then you can either delete things or sometimes like in my business, there are things

00:22:35.300 and records I actually need to maintain for 10 years for just for scientific purposes. Those can go to a

00:22:41.700 separate part of your email. So they're not returning when you're searching for other things and don't

00:22:46.660 clutter up the rest of your space. But I think people need to be less afraid to delete messages

00:22:51.860 that they're no longer going to use and to really think of the inbox, just like you think about your

00:22:57.340 desk. This is a space where I process work that I'm currently working on. It's not a space to archive

00:23:03.660 my entire career, what I've been doing in my entire life and every conversation I've had.

00:23:09.420 And what's your recommendation on like processing? There's different systems out there like inbox zero.

00:23:14.700 So like every day your inbox should be zero and everything should either be read, responded to,

00:23:18.960 deleted, or filed off somewhere. What's your take on that?

00:23:23.240 Yeah. So I don't do inbox zero. I think it's fine if people want to do it. I think there are just some

00:23:29.220 messages that it just takes more than a day to respond to. And so to create an artificial limit and

00:23:35.420 say, I'm not ending the day until I have no messages in my email box, that to me is a bit extreme.

00:23:43.340 But if you think about, okay, these are the things that I'm currently working on and you want to leave

00:23:48.680 those in your inbox, that's fine. But you don't want your inbox to really get bigger than what you

00:23:53.620 can scroll on the screen because that creates visual cues of overwhelmingness. And you turn on

00:24:00.000 your computer the first time in the morning and you don't want to see a whole bunch of visual clutter

00:24:04.400 that sends some pretty negative signals to the brain about feeling overwhelmed. So you do want to keep

00:24:10.180 that limited, but it doesn't have to be zero. And I'd recommend doing email in a few batches a day.

00:24:16.600 So it could be in the morning, in the afternoon, at the end of the workday for you, whatever works

00:24:22.460 for you. What you don't want to do is get in the habit of every email you get, you feel like you need

00:24:28.420 to respond and eliminate immediately. Because when you do that, that's just going to take over your day

00:24:33.540 and create a much bigger mess than the email itself.

00:24:37.000 And I imagine, you know, it's one of the goals of this, of sort of the spark joy philosophy,

00:24:41.180 this tidying philosophy. So you just do it once and you basically don't have to do it again if you

00:24:44.600 don't have to. With email, like we sign up for stuff all the time. That can be a great place to go

00:24:50.820 see like, where am I getting these recurring emails that I don't even need and like unsubscribe

00:24:54.920 from those so you don't get them anymore?

00:24:56.580 Yeah, I think that's one of our recommendations, which is, you know, at one time you were really

00:25:03.080 excited about these email lists, you probably forgot about half of the email list that you

00:25:07.640 were signing up for. You can go through the process of literally unsubscribing from each of them

00:25:13.120 and then saying, okay, do I really want to resubscribe to it? Does this list really spark joy? And then go

00:25:17.780 ahead and resubscribe to those. And what you'll realize is you'll engage more with the messages you

00:25:22.360 care about because the rest of your inbox isn't cluttered with a bunch of stuff that you

00:25:26.520 really don't want to read.

00:25:28.140 What about your smartphone? How do we, what's the big problem there with our smartphones with

00:25:31.700 clutter?

00:25:32.540 Well, I think with smartphones, it's mostly apps. We tend to, on average, add 12 apps a month to

00:25:37.940 our phones, but we only delete 10 of them. So simple math tells us that over time, we're going

00:25:42.740 to have more and more apps on the phone. And, you know, it's not so much the battery power or the

00:25:47.300 storage space that they take up with. It's really just the constant nagging and beeping and the

00:25:53.020 distraction of those. So the advice there is to only have apps on your phone that, again,

00:25:58.960 are necessary, helpful for that joyful future or spark joy. And as many as you can, silence the

00:26:05.600 notifications, turn off the notifications. So you're in control over when you want to engage

00:26:10.620 with the information. Otherwise, the phone is going to be in control of what you're doing.

00:26:14.500 And you kind of see it as you're, you know, you're kind of around and you see other people and you

00:26:18.960 see their phone beep. And it's almost like they have this instinctual biological reaction where they

00:26:24.400 jump as if, you know, something unbelievably important is happening on their phone. It might

00:26:29.420 just be the fact that, you know, on Facebook, their friend posted they were at the donut shop.

00:26:33.980 Right. Well, so another place where clutter can end up, we don't think about where clutter could

00:26:39.220 end up, is our calendar, our schedule. So what sort of activities do we find typically cluttering

00:26:45.700 our day that just make things harder for us to get stuff done? Well, so in the book, we talk about

00:26:50.820 this, this kind of new class or new way of thinking about clutter, which is activity clutter, which is

00:26:55.400 really doing things that aren't making a difference. And a lot of times we end up with activity clutter

00:27:02.580 as a distraction from work that we really care about. So we don't want to do the more important

00:27:08.620 work. Maybe it's working on a difficult project or having a hard conversation, whatever it might

00:27:14.920 be. So we end up just picking up side activities as a distraction. Email is one of those distractions.

00:27:21.380 It's certainly not the only distraction. So with activity clutter, we've got to be careful because

00:27:27.180 it really takes us away from the work that we ought to be doing and that hopefully brings us a lot of joy

00:27:35.040 in doing. So what we want to do in terms of avoiding activity clutter is, again, thinking about

00:27:41.100 that metaphor of what it would be like to bring your physical stuff into one space. You really want to

00:27:47.360 do the same thing with your time and make what we call a task pile, which is a pile of, could be index

00:27:54.340 cards of all of the things that you're doing in a week and kind of see how are you actually spending

00:27:58.960 your time? And are there things that you're doing that are not really making a difference? And what

00:28:04.460 most people find when they go through this exercise is that there's a lot of things that they can

00:28:08.840 eliminate. It could be a report that you produce that no one ever reads. And everyone in the office,

00:28:15.360 everyone in the workplace knows that no one reads this report, yet you've always been doing it. Or

00:28:20.200 there's a presentation that you give to inform a decision that's already been made. Or the weekly

00:28:27.340 meeting that just constantly gets held because it's Monday at three o'clock and we've always held

00:28:32.520 a meeting at Monday at three o'clock. So this is really a technique to be much more intentional with

00:28:37.900 how you're spending time and for people to realize that when you say no to things, you're making space

00:28:43.660 to say yes to things that matter more. I love it. So another place we can declutter our decisions. So

00:28:49.240 what's going on there? How do we accumulate decision clutter?

00:28:54.020 Well, with decisions, there's two types of clutter, basically. There's one, we make far

00:29:01.120 too many decisions than we have the capacity to make. There's different estimates of this.

00:29:07.360 We make a lot of decisions subconsciously, but some people peg the number at about 10,000 decisions

00:29:13.060 in a single day, which is just an astronomical number. The second challenge we have is that

00:29:19.240 within any given decision, we end up with a lot more choices than are optimal. So you can think

00:29:25.940 about this as you just go to the grocery store and you see, you know, 50, a hundred different

00:29:31.880 varieties of cereal. That also tends to overwhelm the brain. So what we want to do when we tidy our

00:29:37.640 decisions is focus on the higher stakes decisions that are going to be the most impactful and try and

00:29:45.400 either eliminate, outsource, or delegate decisions that have lower stakes. You know, there's decisions

00:29:54.060 we can automate. There's decisions that, you know, we really don't need to spend time thinking about. What

00:29:59.260 brand of copy or paper do we want? What kind of font do we want to put on the presentation? Instead, focus on

00:30:06.140 the content of what's in that report or the substance of the presentation. Those are decisions that matter a lot

00:30:12.360 more. And it sounds like as you declutter your physical space or even your digital space, like

00:30:17.620 you're also decluttering decisions in the process. Yeah, no, absolutely. And you're developing the

00:30:22.660 capacity to make better decisions because one of the things with tidying is, you know, people talk about

00:30:29.460 the benefits of, you know, the joy that it brings you or how organized it makes you, but it also is

00:30:35.620 like holding up a big mirror to yourself. It is inherently a process of self-discovery where you

00:30:42.340 look at yourself in a mirror and you ask, what are the things that I stand for? You know, who am I?

00:30:47.720 How am I actually spending my time? And it's that self-discovery process that helps in other aspects

00:30:53.660 of your life. And certainly making decisions is one great example of where that helps.

00:30:59.000 So a common piece of advice that you see in the business literature, whether it's on blogs or books or

00:31:04.780 magazine articles, that you have to grow your network so you can move ahead. But you make this

00:31:10.500 case that spending all that time building your network, you're basically just building up a lot

00:31:14.960 of clutter and it often bears little fruit. Why is that? Well, there's a distinction that we have to

00:31:21.980 make between a large network and a large network of people who actually care about us and who we care

00:31:29.420 about. Because simply having a large network of people who we don't care about and who don't care

00:31:35.500 about us isn't going to be a network that's going to be helpful when we need information, we need

00:31:41.260 advice, we need other types of things. So what we want to do is we want to focus on developing more

00:31:48.680 quality connections as opposed to quantity. So I guess the general rule here is to just stop being

00:31:54.740 infatuated with size and focus on the quality. The brain and neuroscience research shows that we can

00:32:01.660 only handle about 150 meaningful connections. Outside of that, we just can't possibly keep track

00:32:08.560 of that. So we want to focus on quality. And what I mean by quality is these are connections that

00:32:15.320 we feel that we can be vulnerable with, who we are actively looking to try and help and in return are

00:32:22.740 actively trying to help us back. So I mean, how do you focus on building that high quality

00:32:28.660 contact? Do you think it just sort of happens naturally? I mean, that's been my experience.

00:32:33.040 I feel like when I've proactively tried to network, it bears a little fruit. But every now and then,

00:32:37.660 just by doing the work that I'm doing, I run into people who we both find some mutual benefit and we

00:32:44.020 both enjoy them out of the relationship. Yeah. I mean, I think there's lots of ways of building

00:32:48.840 quality relationships, but through a natural process as opposed to being in cocktail parties.

00:32:54.200 And I should just say, you know, that's one of the things I hate most is having to go to a cocktail

00:32:58.720 party. As an introvert, this is one of the worst environments for me to be in. So that's where my

00:33:04.320 bias is coming from. But it's very rare to kind of build a meaningful connection that way. Certainly,

00:33:09.920 if you have a shared interest with someone, a shared passion for doing something, that's much easier.

00:33:15.360 I think, you know, the trick here is really to be present in a relationship. So, you know,

00:33:20.440 the amount of time it can take you to write, let's say, a handwritten note to someone versus

00:33:28.080 the amount of time it could take to like a post on Facebook or to, you know, give a thumbs up on a

00:33:35.000 LinkedIn post. I mean, those are very different experiences. And the kind of the Facebook and

00:33:41.200 LinkedIn and all the social media ones come across as really just very cursory and not very meaningful.

00:33:46.640 I mean, in fact, they have pre-populated messages you can send on LinkedIn. So someone gets a

00:33:51.160 promotion and you can just click a button and say, congratulations. I mean, that's not really how you

00:33:55.860 build a connection. You can imagine what that would be if instead you actually wrote that person

00:34:00.560 a customized email or even a handwritten note offering very specific and genuine

00:34:06.160 congratulations as opposed to simply just clicking a button. So that's the first thing is to really

00:34:12.620 be present and to kind of not just do the bare minimum, but to show genuine interest in someone

00:34:18.020 because that's the foundation of a good connection. I'd say another thing you can do is just help

00:34:23.040 people. That's a great way of starting off a relationship is making the first move and helping

00:34:28.520 them do their best work or, you know, solve a problem in their life. That builds trust and that trust

00:34:35.240 tends to be reciprocated in relationships. If it's not, that's a signal to you that that's probably

00:34:39.840 not someone you want to form a high quality connection with. But if it is, that trust ends

00:34:44.280 to then tends to build over time and makes it easier to move to deeper aspects of the relationship.

00:34:51.060 That sounds like what you and Marie did, right? She reached out to you. You had like sort of this

00:34:54.140 same interest and this is what you got to book now together.

00:34:57.980 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

00:34:59.140 So here's something I think people would be happy to tidy up. Meetings. No one likes meetings,

00:35:04.680 but sometimes we have to have meetings. So how do we tidy those up? How can we figure out

00:35:09.500 like when we absolutely need to have a meeting? And then when we do have those meetings, how can we

00:35:14.320 make them like effective without spending a lot of time in a meeting?

00:35:20.500 Yeah. I mean, I think when I talk to people and I see this in my research too, is meetings are the

00:35:25.680 thing that people just despise. And it's, you know, everyone's in the room. No one wants to be

00:35:31.200 there. No one feels anything is being done yet. We can spend up to a third of our days in meetings.

00:35:37.200 I mean, it's just, you know, one of these things that is universally hated, but also universally done.

00:35:41.940 So the question is, well, how did we end up in this position? And I think that's, that's a good

00:35:46.740 starting place because it helps us solve the problem. And I'd say part of this is as we're,

00:35:52.580 as we're getting into our careers, we become part of the problem. And what I mean by that is

00:35:59.780 we develop almost a sense of meeting FOMO, the sense that if I didn't get invited to this meeting,

00:36:07.500 it means that I'm not important or I'm not valued, or I'm not going to advance in my career. So we

00:36:15.280 clamor and clamor to get invited to more meetings, even though we know that we're not going to enjoy

00:36:21.020 them and they're not going to be productive. And so that's, that's kind of the irony of,

00:36:25.200 of what's happening with meetings. So I think what you want to do is focus on those meetings where you

00:36:31.960 feel like you can make the most contribution. And, you know, sometimes you just don't have a choice.

00:36:36.980 I mean, we, we work for, for supervisors and bosses and they might order us to go to a meeting. And I

00:36:42.740 think, you know, people underestimate how much agency and freedom they have and realize that having a

00:36:49.900 conversation, a diplomatic conversation about whether or not this is the most productive use

00:36:55.360 of your time. I think people are reluctant to have that conversation. But again, if you think about

00:36:59.600 the role of a manager, which is to help optimize resources, that person here, she doesn't want you 0.53

00:37:05.700 wasting your time if it's not valuable for you to be there. So I don't think people should be

00:37:09.520 bashful about having that conversation. When you get invited to a meeting, I'd say, you know, first ask

00:37:15.260 for an agenda. If the organizer doesn't have an agenda, that's probably a really bad sign. You

00:37:20.520 might want to politely suggest or have a supervisor politely suggest that they send out a meeting to

00:37:26.400 show this is the structure of how we want the conversation to unfold. This is our objective.

00:37:31.860 If you have a meeting that, for example, is really meant just to spread information,

00:37:37.840 disseminate information, as opposed to generate discussion or make a decision, you don't really

00:37:44.440 need the meeting. So that information can be put in a mess, a short email, it could be

00:37:50.100 put into a video, you don't need to have everyone in the room at a specific time to just spread

00:37:55.440 information. But you know, making decisions or generating new ideas, those are really what are

00:38:00.940 good for meetings. So I think asking for an agenda is a really big, big part of it, making sure that

00:38:07.100 there's a clear objective at the end of the meeting, this is what we want to do. Having the right people

00:38:12.880 in the room is also important. You really can't have an effective meeting if the number is going

00:38:17.540 more than 10. It's just hard for everyone to be heard, everyone to feel like their opinions are

00:38:22.080 mattering and counting. So you want to keep the numbers, you know, 10 or 10 or fewer. You want to

00:38:28.260 have a timeline. I mean, our attention spans are increasingly shorter and shorter. So when you're

00:38:34.100 going more than 60 minutes, I mean, you're already pushing it at 60 minutes. So don't go more than 60

00:38:38.800 minutes. I think that's also important. And, you know, find a way of summarizing what you talked

00:38:43.820 about at the meeting and, you know, trying to say, okay, well, this is what we decided, or this is

00:38:48.640 the ideas that we generated to, you know, not only kind of crystallize what the meeting accomplished,

00:38:54.020 but to also kind of signal to people that says, hey, you know what, not every meeting has to be bad.

00:38:58.520 And the problem isn't that meetings are bad. The problem is that meetings are unorganized. And when

00:39:03.280 they become organized, they could be very effective tools for getting work done.

00:39:06.840 I like the idea of just like nixing all informational meetings, because I've been in

00:39:10.340 organizations where that, you know, the manager there wanted to do, or the person in charge

00:39:14.200 wanted to just have meetings where you just spend an hour where every person just sort of reported

00:39:17.800 what's going on. And it's like, how could this not have been done in an email?

00:39:21.520 I mean, what a waste of time. You think about just how expensive that is in terms of people

00:39:25.640 and time when everyone could have just contributed to a share the document on the drive, spent their

00:39:32.040 two minutes doing the update, and everyone could have spent five or 10 minutes reading everything

00:39:35.840 and got the same amount of information. But meetings for some people are more of a political

00:39:41.560 tool, and they become a way of showing, hey, look, I'm important because the meeting I'm running,

00:39:46.360 look how many people are here, or, you know, look how often we meet. But the reality is,

00:39:51.360 is you're just killing the joy out of everyone who's going.

00:39:54.140 Well, Scott, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:39:56.360 The best place is my website, which is www.scottsonenshine.com. And that's S-C-O-T-T-S-O-N-E-N-S-H-E-I-N.

00:40:08.860 And you can download some information about each of the books, Stretch, Enjoy at Work. And you can

00:40:14.560 also get some freebies in terms of, I've got a quiz up there, I've got some book discussion guides,

00:40:19.040 as well as some articles that I've written about these ideas in a variety of different magazines.

00:40:24.500 Fantastic. Well, Scott Sonenshine, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:40:27.540 Thank you so much again for having me.

00:40:29.420 My guest is Scott Sonenshine. He's the co-author of the book, Joy at Work. It's available on

00:40:33.040 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his

00:40:36.460 website, scottsonenshine.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash work declutter,

00:40:41.660 where you can find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:40:51.320 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Check out our

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00:41:27.640 it's Brett McKay reminding not only to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 13, 2020

#626： How to Declutter Every Aspect of Your Work Life

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