#626： How to Declutter Every Aspect of Your Work Life
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Summary
When you think about decluttering, you probably think about your home life and cleaning out your junk drawer. But there are also ways to declutter your work life and tidy up both its physical and digital aspects. My guest today explains the art of practicing minimalism in your professional life in a book he co-authored with organizing expert Marie Kondo.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you
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think about decluttering, you probably think about your home life and cleaning out your
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junk drawer, your closet. There are also ways to declutter your work life and tidy up both
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its physical and digital aspects. My guest today explains the art of practicing minimalism
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in your professional life in a book he co-authored with organizing expert Marie Kondo. His name
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is Scott Sonenschein. He's a professor of business and management and his book is Joy at Work.
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Scott and I begin our conversation by unpacking the benefits of keeping your work life neat
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and tidy and then move into how to do this in regards to your physical workspace. Scott
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shares three questions to ask yourself when you declutter your office to help you decide
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which items to keep and which to throw away. We also take a useful aside to how to throw
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away your children's artwork with less guilt. We then move into how to declutter your digital
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life by cleaning up your email inbox and smartphone. We end our discussion with several areas you
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may not think of in terms of clutter, but probably need some tidying up, including your activities,
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your decisions, your network, and meetings. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at aom.is slash declutterwork. Scott joins you now via clearcast.io.
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So we had you on three years ago to talk about your book, Stretch, Unlock the Power of Less.
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You got a new book out and it's called Joy at Work, Organizing Your Professional Life. And with
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this book, you teamed up with Marie Kondo, who is famously the Japanese lady who has gotten
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millions of Americans to pick up their tchotchkes in their house, asking, does it spark joy? And
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helping people become more tidy. And I'm curious, how did you, how did this, how did this partnership
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come about to take Marie's ideas about minimalism and keeping things tidy and applying it to the work,
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Well, my research and writing has been on the power of less and how can we live a meaningful life and
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have a successful career when facing all kinds of constraints and challenges. And in Stretch,
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what I do is I explain that many of our greatest accomplishments and most satisfying moments
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happen when we are making the most out of our resources versus trying to acquire more and more
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things, money, time, information, and so on. And Marie had learned about Stretch. It had come out
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in February, 2017. And in March, she had gotten in contact with me and wanted to learn more about
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how the ideas in my book were consistent with what she was doing in her work and what some of the
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science would say about her tidying perspective. So she invited me to her house. She was living in
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the San Francisco area at the time and had a nice conversation for a few hours over some nice Japanese
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tea and talked about how different aspects of her work were very complimentary. And at the end of
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that meeting, we decided we would go ahead and write a book together about work.
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Well, that's a cool story. Because when I first saw it, how did that happen? I'm always curious
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when you had to see these unique partnerships show up. So she reached out to you. And so when
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you started looking at this, when you started organizing the book, you started thinking about
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this book together, you started off talking about the benefits of our work life when we keep things
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tidy. So she has her philosophy and you have this scientific research to back it up. What are the
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benefits of our work life when we keep things tidy there?
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Well, I think the first thing to realize is that there's real damage that comes from
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messes, especially in the workplace. So surveys show that about 90% of Americans believe that
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physical clutter has harmed them. And it turns out they're right. We know from physiological studies
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that having physical clutter around increases cortisol levels. It makes us moody. And then beyond
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the physical, I mean, there's just all kinds of other messes at work that we're dealing with,
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drowning in emails or poorly organized meetings. Just the annual bill in the US for poorly organized
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meetings is about $400 billion a year in lost productivity. So when we tidy, we get things
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organized and we end up with several important benefits. So the first and most important one
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is we just feel better. So tidying is about making intentional choices about what our environment
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looks like, what activities we're doing. And when we do that, it gives us more work satisfaction
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because we feel more in control over our work. And we know from the research that this sense
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of control is one of the most fundamental human motivations. Beyond feeling better, we're also
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more productive because we're just not wasting our time looking for things, whether they be physical
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things or things in our digital space. Our time is better spent in meetings and the rest of our days.
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And then lastly, I would say our reputation improves. And we know from perception studies that people who
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are tidier are viewed by others as more intelligent, harder working, and also kinder.
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Gotcha. You know, that idea of it makes you just feel better. I was a research assistant for a
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professor in law school and he was, you know, sort of really old school. And so when I researched things
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online, he'd want me to print off webpages and like he collected in. So instead of having stuff on his
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computer, he just had stacks and stacks and stacks of paper everywhere. And you go into his office and
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you had to kind of like navigate like it was a small maze. I just felt really, I don't know, I felt bad.
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It's like small and cramped and it wasn't a pleasant experience going into the office. I always try to
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like go in there only when I had absolutely had to go in there.
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Well, as a professor, I hear where he's coming from. And I'd say that most of my colleagues are
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like that too. We tend to be some of the worst hoarders out there, not just of paperwork,
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but especially with books. And actually one of the things I did when I first started deciding to
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work with Marie's, I said, I really have to fully embody her perspective to make sure I can, you know,
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go ahead and write a book with her. So I went through my office, which probably looked very similar to
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the office that you were just talking about when you were a research assistant. And my problem was,
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was books. And I had, I don't know, at least 400 or so books out there. And I threw them all on the
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floor and I picked each one up and I, you know, started reflecting about, you know, whether or not
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this book was still important to me, if it was still sparking joy, if it was still useful. And I
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realized that so many of these books were just relics of the past. They were previous projects I did or
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other activities or interests I used to be into that no longer were important to me. And I ended up
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getting rid of about half of my books and donating them and making my space a lot more organized. So
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I, I hear you on, uh, on, you know, some of those, uh, professorial offices. I mean, they, they tend to
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Well, I've, but I've heard that, you know, I've read research where it says that messy environments can
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actually make us more creative. Is there anything to that?
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Well, yeah. And that's a, that's a, that's a good question because of course, uh, a lot of my work
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and a lot of other people's work really depends on, on creativity. And there is this, this notion
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or this popular belief that messiness just inspires and sparks creativity. Now, in fairness,
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there is a, there is a study of, uh, that's done that shows that messes can create some creativity,
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but you know, some of the, you know, the way that the study is, is done is it's, it's looking at
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differences between what they call a orderly room and a disorderly room. And what they mean by that is
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where things are actually put in the room, as opposed to the sheer quantity of what's in the
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room. And one of the things that you get when you tidy is you're making intentional choices to keep
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things that you love in your work environment and on your calendar. And that puts you into a headspace
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that really is conducive to sparking creativity because it increases positive emotions. We titled
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our book joy at work because this method is meant to bring about more joyful feelings throughout the
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work day. And as a positive emotion, uh, joy broadens our, our thoughts and expands our, our
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creativity. What is, so you mean, so tidying definitely makes you feel good because whenever
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I'm feeling bad, you know, I'm not in control. Like typically you want to do is tidy and it feels
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great, but I also noticed I've used it as a procrastination tool. It's like if I, something's
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hard and uncomfortable, I had to do with work and I really don't want to do it. I find myself
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organizing my desk drawer. How do you prevent tidying? Because it does, as you said,
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feels good to becoming a tool to procrastinate with. So with, with tidying, what you get is a
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process that when you do it once, you really don't need to do it again. Marie likes to talk about how
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people who physically tidy don't rebound. And what she means by that is they don't end up with a lot
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of clutter that would provoke them to have to start this process all over again. On the non-physical side,
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for example, I talk about what you can do with your inbox and people who have a tidy inbox are not the
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people who are constantly checking their email and distracted and trying to move things into
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different folders as a way of avoiding work. In fact, one thing that you can think of is that clutter
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is the ultimate tool for procrastination because instead of doing what we're supposed to be doing
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in our work, instead of engaging with the work that we love, we end up cluttering ourselves,
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whether it be just having more things around, having more stuff on our calendars, going to more
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meetings as a way of not doing the work that we should be doing. I mean, there's this notion that
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for some people, email has become their job when the reality is, is email is simply a tool to get
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their job done. So it's the clutter itself that tends to be the tool of procrastination.
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And once you develop a system for tidying and you do it once, there's little maintenance that's
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needed. So it doesn't become this thing that you can always turn to and say, okay, let me reorganize
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my desk and tidy it again. If you've done it once the proper way, you don't need to do it again.
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Right. And so if you don't have to do it again and you want to procrastinate,
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You can't use, oh, I've did something good here. All right. So you break, this book's broken down into
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two sections on the how-to part. So they're very practical. And it's first is organizing
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your physical space and then organizing your digital life. Let's talk about the physical
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workspace. What type of things are we focused on here?
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Well, in the, in the physical space, we're talking about things like books, paperwork,
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and this miscellaneous category, which tends to be a lot of things. It could be office supplies.
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It could be electronic devices or cords for those devices. Sometimes there's job specific items. So
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maybe product samples or customer collateral, personal care items you might bring to the office
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or working from home in your own home space that are in your workspace and then food. And so these are
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the, these are the main physical, physical things that you would have in your, in your workspace that
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When you and Marie were working on this book, and I'm sure you like talk to people about what stuff
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consumed, like what was the type of clutter, physical clutter that really caused a lot of
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Well, I think paperwork is a, is a big one. There's this sense that people just want to hold on to
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paperwork, but then I think everyone has their own idiosyncratic thing. So food items is a, is another
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big one. Some people have pantries in their, in their workspace and have just a lot of, a lot of food.
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Some of it well past the expiration date. Office supplies is another big one. I mean, how many
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paperclips do you really need in your desk? Do you really need more than a handful of pens? But
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some people would have dozens, if not more of these pens. So I think, I think there's, there's a lot of
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variety out there, but I think the general themes are too much paperwork, too many office supplies,
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and then something idiosyncratic, usually for, for a person, whether it be food for one person or
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maybe some personal care items for another one. Yeah. Books are a big problem for me because
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people, companies and publishers always sending me books and they stack up and then like, and I'm
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always like, I should hold onto this. It's a book. But yeah, I sometimes I'll just have stacks and
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stacks and stacks build up before until it becomes so overpowering. I have to just donate them all to
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the library. Yeah. And you know, books, books again, too, like for, for me as a professor are really
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hard, but then you realize that, you know, someone else can benefit from the book too. And so maybe it's
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spoken to at one point, or maybe it doesn't even speak to you and you can, you can give it to someone
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else. I'd say another, another thing that is probably worth mentioning is just the struggle
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to that people, especially with kids have around sentimental items. And I know I struggled a little
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with this one too, which is namely my kids artwork. And, you know, you could have artwork that goes back
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10 years and you, you hold on to every, everything that your child's done and you're proud of it and
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you should be proud of it. But people really have a hard time parting with those items. And those,
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those stack up over time, especially if you have more than one kid.
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I think there was like an onion headline where it was like, mom asks 30 year old if she, if she wants
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folder full of middle school artwork. And I think every person can relate to that because I'm sure every
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person's mom kept their middle school artwork. And they're like, why'd you, why'd you keep this?
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Well, I thought you'd need it one day. It's like, I don't need this anymore.
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Yeah. There's a, there's actually a study, really fascinating study with a, a simple trick
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for when you're struggling with discarding sentimental items. What the study shows is
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taking a photo of it makes it much easier to get rid of the physical relic. So obviously you're
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taking a picture and that's taking up a little space, but that's far better than keeping the
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physical item. So whether, if it's in the office, if it's in your home, taking a picture of that
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sentimental item tends to give yourself permission to discard the physical item when it no longer
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Well, I do that with my kid's artwork. I'll take a picture of it. Cause like, you know,
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kids, your kids make you stuff and like, here, I'm giving this to you. And it's basically the
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same drawing that they've done over and over again. And you've collected like 20 of them in
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the past week. And then if you throw it, you can't throw it away. Cause your kid's like,
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why'd you throw it away? Did you not like my thing? So what I do is I take a picture of it
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before? Cause I want to keep onto it. It's nice to see that or I'll scan it. That's another thing
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Yeah. So those are all good tools and then you can surreptitiously throw it out and hopefully
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they won't notice. Right. Put it back at the bottom of the garbage can. So with paperwork,
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any tips there on, on keeping that tidy and clutter free?
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Well, the reality is, is that most paperwork we simply just don't need to hold on to. Most things can
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be digitized. We don't need to digitize everything. I mean, if it's, if it's not needed,
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we go through a three-step process. So unlike the, the home where you can just ask, does it spark joy
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and then decide if you want to keep it or not at work? And this is true for physical clutter and
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this true for non-physical clutter as well. We basically go through three questions. You have
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to ask first, is this item necessary for my job? There are some things we just simply have to keep
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because they're part of doing our jobs. Two, is this helpful for a joyful future? And by that,
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what we mean is maybe it will help you advance in your career or it will teach you something that
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you want to know, but it's going to help bring about that type of future that you will find
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joyful. And then third, does it all, does it spark joy? And if, if you answer yes to any of those three
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questions, then an item is worth keeping. For a lot of paperwork, the answer is, is, is no to all three
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of those. And those can be shredded or discarded. If you still need to keep it scanning, it tends to
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be better than, than having the physical copy be there. And there's lots of, I mean, you can go
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online. People have developed systems about digitizing your paperwork. Paperwork, if you need
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to do that, where you just buy a scanner and then you scan it and it goes to like a digital inbox
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somewhere. And you, it's there if you need it, but it's not taking up your physical space.
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So physical space, pretty easy. So just like stuff that's cluttering your desk. So when you're doing
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this, is this like, you said it shouldn't be a continual process. Like, how do you know when
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you're done? Like, how do you know when you're, you're tidy enough on your physical space or even
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this could apply to the digital space? Yeah. So what you've got to do is you've got to kind of
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have your starting place. So kind of like your, you know, your, your first go at this and you've got
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to do this in kind of a condensed time period. This is nothing, this is not a process where you're going
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to spend an hour this week, an hour next week. There's a sense of having to put
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everything in one place because a big part of the method is to realize just how much you have,
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whether it be how much physical stuff you have, how many emails in your inbox, how many meetings
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you go to every week. So you want to, you want to make these piles, either literally these piles or
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metaphorically these piles. So that's, that's a process that has to be done in a condensed period
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of time. So you go through that initial process of, and let's just take the physical space as an
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example here. And you could spend half a day going through the physical process, going through books,
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paperwork, miscellaneous stuff, and sentimental stuff. And then after that, as you go through
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that process and you apply these three criteria we talked about, is it necessary? Is it helpful for
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the joyful future? And does it spark joy? You're not only choosing what to keep, you're also teaching
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yourself an important lesson about what you value, what you prioritize, how you're spending your time.
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And this is a set of criteria that's going to stay with you, that when you encounter something in the
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future, it could be a piece of paper, it could be a request to do something, it could be an email,
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you're going to be able to more quickly and more accurately and more effectively apply these three
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keep criteria and make the decision, is this an item or an activity that I want to keep? So after you go
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through that first process, which is the most time consuming part of it, afterwards, you've internalized
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these rules that make subsequent decisions so much faster that you never really have to go back and
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do all of that initial work again. So it becomes second nature with practice, basically.
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Yeah, exactly. What are you going for? Okay. So let's talk about the digital space because,
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I mean, physical space, you can see the stuff that's in front of you, you trip over it.
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So I think people get that, like they can feel the clutter, but your digital life can be cluttered as
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well. What type of things, I mean, how has digital clutter changed the tidying game?
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Well, it's changed a lot because as a lot of the world is moving online and digitally,
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a lot of the clutter is naturally following through. So we've got overstuffed email inboxes,
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hard drives that are packed with files and phones that are full of apps that are constantly chirping
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and buzzing and beeping at us and just annoying and distracting us. So the bigger challenge with
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digital clutter relative to physical clutter is storage space just seems endless. So it's so
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tempting to just say, let me just keep everything. Why do I need to bother getting rid of anything?
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Because I have more or less unlimited space. But the challenge is that that clutter creates
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downstream effects. So for example, never deleting a file on your hard drive ends up cluttering your
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file system. That makes it more difficult to locate documents that you need. Emails just take up a lot
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of time and people just have a hard time deleting anything that when they need, when they actually
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need an email that they should have kept, they can't, they can't find it. And phones by just constantly
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having apps on it are just, you're just providing more reasons for the phone to be interrupting you.
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And we know from the search that a single interruption from a phone, it could take as much as 26 minutes
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for the brain to recover and go back to the place that it was at. So it's not benign to just say,
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I've got unlimited storage space. Let me just keep all of this stuff around. All of those things turn
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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
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used email because it was just like, oh, you can just archive it and then just pull up, like do a
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Google search basically in your email inbox and find whatever you need whenever you need it. But then
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like you have to start thinking like, do I have that? Is that, does that even a thing? Like you have
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to start maintaining a file in your head, which can just cause a lot of problems.
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Yeah, that's absolutely right. And at its extreme, I think the Guinness world record holder,
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a guy by the name of Joey Manzala with 4.2 million emails in his inbox, but you don't really need to
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be Joey to have a problem. I mean, I think a lot of people struggle with digital clutter because
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they don't, they either, I mean, you end up with different ways that people handle this. There's
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people who just will never process an email. It will stay in their inbox. And if they need to find
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something, they'll have to rely on the search function, which could help a little, but they
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still are going to end up with a lot of hits to have to go through. So for example, let's say
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you're working on a PowerPoint presentation for a client and you search for deck and you end up with
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your home improvement project popping up. So you've got issues like that. And then you've got issues of
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sometimes you want to be able to look at a thematic set of emails, which is also difficult if you're
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simply keeping everything. But at the other extreme, you've got people who've got just
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hundreds and hundreds of folders that the folders themselves become a problem to just try and think,
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what folder does that go in? Or, you know, what folder is this email that they need to go
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reference in? So what we recommend here is to have a pretty limited set of folders. So no more than 10
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folders. There's lots of, you know, the research on digital processing shows that even when you
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provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to someone that one system is more effective than
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the system they're using, they're just very resistant to change. So I think in this, in this
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aspect of tidying, we're a little more flexible than in some of the other aspects. But what we do
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recommend is limiting it to about 10 folders that are meaningful to you. For me, I basically have
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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
00:24:56.580
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
00:25:28.140
What about your smartphone? How do we, what's the big problem there with our smartphones with
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.
00:34:59.140
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
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.
00:40:29.420
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
00:40:54.300
website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of
00:40:57.780
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00:41:27.640
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