Spring has sprung! The new season brings about a fresh start and nothing screams fresh start like spring cleaning. While most people focus on knocking the cobwebs out of their homes, spring cleaning can also aid in ushering in a new season at the office as well.

Marie Kondo, the New York Times best selling author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” is the undisputed queen of creating a clean and tidy space. In fact, Marie has been so influential that in early 2019 Netflix launched its special “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.” The principles behind Marie’s methods can (and should in our humble opinion!) be applied to office spaces as well. Below find our tips and tricks for decluttering your space to find joy.

• Visualize: Have a concrete idea as to why you want to declutter your office space. What do you hope to accomplish? How will it feel to work in a tidy organized space?

• Gratitude: Express thankfulness for your space. While this may seem too ridiculous for many individuals, your office space is where you spend 40+ hours a week, eat at least one meal a day, met that big deadline, wrote that brilliant email – take a moment to appreciate all of the big things that have and will occur here.

• Sparks Joy: Only keeping items that spark joy is Marie’s most well known decluttering advice. While work documents are unlikely to spark joy in most of us, a practical way of looking at this is what items do you love using? What items help make your work day easier, more efficient, more fun?
• Store Like with Like: This one is simple, store like items together. Marie also suggests keeping boxes (shoe boxes, makeup boxes, etc.) to put in drawers which helps separate and organize items. Trust me, reorganizing my work “junk drawer” using this method made a world of difference.

Another way to help get yourself in the spring cleaning mood at work is to have the entire office participate. Here at CipherHealth we recently held a Spring Cleaning Session on a Friday afternoon. Having a dedicated time for everyone to declutter and clean their space encouraged participation and even made cleaning a little bit fun.

For more information about the CipherHealth workspace, check out our feature in The Muse. If you’d like to become a member of our team, visit our careers page.