#5 - “Joy at Work” Analysis: The Right Lessons for the Wrong Workplace
Marie Kondo and co-author Scott Sonenshein impart excellent advice for career success. However, COVID-19 upended many traditional workplace customs and norms, perhaps irreversibly.
When people hear the name “Marie Kondo,” they naturally think of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo’s iconic book—almost an instruction manual, really—on reorganizing and decluttering the home. Perhaps those who missed the first wave of Kondo mania associate her more with the 2019 Netflix original series. Regardless, Marie Kondo has built a world-renowned reputation as the definitive tidying guru by channeling her viral “KonMari Method.”
Earlier this year, Kondo launched a collaboration with The Container Store, and it was while I was browsing the collection of shoe organizers, wicker bins, and storage canisters that I came across a prominent display advertising her latest publication—Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life. While Kondo’s original book focused more on tidying up physical spaces in the home, this installment promises to take the tried-and-true KonMari principles and apply them to the physical workspace, especially in a more white-collar office setting, with the goal of increasing productivity and happiness at work.
While Kondo discusses how to tidy a physical desk in the office, more in line with her traditional offerings on decluttering, co-author Scott Sonenshein devotes the back half of the book to tidying digital clutter in our work lives such as computer files, emails, calendar invites, and even more nebulous things like networking and decision making. I was sold on this interesting take and thought I’d give the book a shot.
As I write this post, well over 18 months since the ramifications of COVID-19 disrupted and revolutionized our relationship with work and the workplace, some of Kondo’s tidying tips do feel a bit outdated for those working in a white-collar office environment in late 2021, seemingly eons away from the quaint days of early 2020.
For instance, the author’s chapter on tidying the physical office may be less relevant for workers who find themselves in a hybrid office environment, where temporary workspaces and “hot desking/hoteling” are gaining steam. In a world where you don’t have a permanent desk assignment, office equipment is standardized, and rooms are siloed and restocked daily, there is not much room to implement many of Kondo’s bigger picture organizing schemes oriented around a dedicated workspace.
With that said, Sonenshein’s chapters on tidying the digital aspects of work are more important than ever as collaborative digital platforms like Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx become as essential as PowerPoint and Dropbox for many businesses. Even as some office workers return to a 100%-in-person schedule or more of a hybrid approach, software tools will continue to play a growing role in the way we do business and have the potential to greatly improve our relationship with work if we implement them smartly and intentionally.
Here are just a few of my favorite excerpts from the text:
On Tidying Time:
Don’t confuse urgent and important tasks. They’re not the same. Urgent tasks are those that must be done by a certain time. If not, they can’t be done at all—joining a client for dinner on the only day she’s in town, helping a colleague meet a project deadline, or attending an annual team retreat.
Important tasks are different. There are big positive outcomes for performing them or big negative consequences for not performing them. Examples include personal development, updating a product, and developing a good relationship with colleagues.
Important tasks tend to be more difficult to complete than urgent ones, making us more enticing to start them and pleasing to finish. In the long term, however, [urgent tasks] are not the type of work that really matters to your career and company.
We also get tricked into focusing on urgent tasks through artificial deadlines. There’s a lot of “fake urgency” at work. After a coworker or client asked you to get back to them within a week, have you ever wondered where the week deadline came from? Too often, it’s completely arbitrary.
On Compulsively Checking Email
Research finds that the more time you spend on email, the lower your productivity and the higher your stress levels. […] I know it’s tempting to check email all the time. I feel that way, too. I worry I’ll miss something important, and there’s a part of me that thinks being responsible means always being responsive. But I like to remind myself that I have other obligations, which are usually more important. If you’re constantly tempted to read and reply, make your own email office hours and give yourself space to enjoy your job without interruption—even if it’s just turning off email for thirty minutes a day.
On Networking
There’s a big difference between having a network full of valuable contacts and having a network full of valuable contacts truly willing to help.
Large networks make it difficult to form meaningful connections. Studies conclude that people can reasonably handle about 150 meaningful connections. Beyond that, it’s hard to genuinely know people in your network.
Even for those with large networks, most of their interactions come from a small subset of their networks. Many of the “friends” in our network have little interest in sincerely connecting with us.
Give yourself permission to be choosy about your connections. I used to impulsively respond yes to every LinkedIn or Facebook friend request because of the short-term high I’d get from adding yet another contact. But I realized that I wasn’t really building a network but rather just accumulating a bunch of loose associations.
Let’s replace networking with high-quality connecting, substituting large networks that often have little substance with smaller networks of connections that truly spark joy.
I recommend giving the full book a read, especially those chapters on identifying and decreasing the digital clutter in our lives, but I hope Kondo and Sonenshein will give us a “2.0” update of Joy at Work for the post-COVID workplace. Surely there will continue to be a need for physical and digital tidying as workers learn how to cope with the evolving workplace and pioneer a new strategy for career success that “sparks joy.”