Think of the various desks you've seen in the past few weeks. These might include:

your own!

your boss's desk

the staff worker at the dimly lit DMV office

a colleague's desk

a desk of an actor on The Office

Ok, so you might not watch The Office as religiously as I do but you can surely conjure up a mental picture of something unpleasant and frought with issues: a messy desk.

The over/under of a messy desk is that it reveals something about its captain. Without being overly judgmental, its messiness could mean that:

You're a messy person by nature (hey, it's possible!)

You've got more work than you know what to do with

Youre colleagues are enablers who perpetuate a culture of "passing the buck" to you and others

Youre productivity skills are rusty and you've simply grown comfortable with disorder

Your office hours are truncated such that you don't have enough hours to actually sit and do work

Truthfully, your situation might also encompass a combination of any of the items above. My bottom line snapshot is simpler- something's not working.

I'm not saying that you've got to go all bonzai-tree simple and have nothing but an Apple Macbook Air on your desk (but seriously, what would be wrong with that?) but some semblance of order is essential. This post is not a how-to of clearing your desk or even of organizing what throws itself at you on a daily basis. It's simply a gentle reminder that the outside reveals the inside.

It may be that one's desk is the surest road sign of the unity of the material with the spiritual. I'm dead serious- how we work and what our space looks like tells us something profound about ourselves.

What bit of order can you bring to your desk this week? Just taking action on one little thing speaks volumes.

Quote for the Road: "Peace is the tranquility of order." St. Augustine of Hippo

Photo by PollyAlida