What’s on your desk? A computer? A lamp? Office supplies? Stacks of paper and unpaid bills? If your desk is cluttered, it may be costing you precious time by hampering your productivity. Organizing your office desk has clearly become a top priority.

Is your desk cluttered? Does sitting at it overwhelm you? Piles of paper, no matter how neatly stacked, represent work to be done; the larger the pile, the more likely your brain is to simply quit on you, which leads to our next question:

Does your mind tend to wander a lot when you’re working? Do ideas refuse to flow smoothly when you need them to? It’s not adult-onset attention deficit disorder; it’s just the clutter in your life. Your brain wants to think about anything except the work in front of it.

And, finally, do you feel you should be able to do more in a day than you do? Are you depressed by the amount of work left undone at the end of the day? Worse still, are you bringing work home from the office, not to get ahead, but to catch up?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then the clutter on your desk may be lowering your productivity levels. A desk that you feel is cluttered is an obvious clue, of course, but sometimes we spend so much of our life with clutter that we don’t really recognize it when we see it. Look at the other factors and ask yourself if they apply to you.

For example, earlier we spoke of piles of paper. Paper can be stacked neatly on the edge of the desk, so tidy that you’d never think of it as clutter. But it is, and it can inhibit your productivity. Order your desk and your productivity will be enhanced dramatically.