Ready Room


Ready Room

Some tasks and processes require managing states of higher disorder.

But having clear paths and spaces to the most mission critical tasks is always good.

Originally shared by M Sinclair Stevens

Lifehacks: The State of Readiness
An old story has it that when an IBM manager saw a light indicating two states, working and idle, he had the label "idle" changed to "ready"...because "our machines are never idle."

Most of my life I, too, have switched between these two extremes; I'm either fully engaged or not. As one boss described me, I'm on or off...there is no middle ground. One effect of this trait is that my desk, my virtual desktop, or any room that I'm working on a project is left in disarray. When I'm focused, I will work slightly past the point of sheer exhaustion, then drop everything and fall asleep.

I was talking to a colleague about the concept of orderliness and how chaos seems to be winning the battle in my life. We are both old enough to be cognizant of how our physical environment affects our mental state. Despite decades of rationalization on how a messy desk is a sign of a creative mind, for us two, this has not been the case in practice.

My own experience tells me I'm lying to myself. One of my most productive work environments was when I was on contract and assigned a desk where I was not allowed to leave anything over night. Each morning I'd come in, lay out my pen case, my notebook, my headphones and power up the computer while I went to get a cup of coffee. Each evening, I'd put everything away, erasing all signs that I had ever been there. Coming into work and facing that clean desk every day was one of the best experiences I'd ever had. There was nothing to distract me. Nothing hanging over me from the previous day. From the moment I sat down, I was ready to work.

So as I was griping about the unending battle against disorderliness in my own life, my colleague countered with a lifehack he'd read which sounded so much like one of those "one weird trick" articles that he was almost embarrassed to mention it. As I have been to you.

But I've tried it for a couple of months now and I've found it effective. So I'm curious if it will work for anyone else. I'll call the concept "room readiness" for lack of a better term. The idea is that when you leave a room, you glance around to see if anything is out of place and then you put it away. Right then. The goal is to leave every room in a state of readiness. That way, when you walk back into it, you can get right to work rather than be distracted by some other thing.

When I first heard this, I thought it was impossible...ridiculous and unachievable. My workspace still looks like a college dorm room and more than one sweetheart has condemned me as the biggest slob they've ever met. However, I like experiments, so I was willing to give it a try.

And it worked for me. By taking that one extra minute to straighten up my desk or take the coffee cup into the kitchen or put the books back on the shelf, I save myself five or ten minutes the next time I walk back into the room, trying to figure out where I left off and get myself started again.

The most difficult part of the challenge has been applying the lesson to my virtual desktop. I'm one of those people who has scores of windows and tabs open. (And, yes, Post-It Notes stuck on my monitor and everywhere else.) When I follow through, I'm rewarded the next day...so I will keep at it and see if I can change the bad habits of years.

Apparently the guy was right: there's a big difference between idleness and readiness.

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