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I had a personal meeting with Shanker Bakshi, Mohit Aneja and Ravi P. Tiwari to discuss a few things regarding the Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance website that is set to launch with a bang on a very special date: 08-08-08. It was basically a review meeting to gather Ravi’s ideas on our progress as he’s been associated with similar organizations when covering their events and activities for the newspaper.

A few important things came up, like the idea of having a Hindi version of the website. We have already found out various solutions to this challenge that sounded a little hard till yesterday evening. उदहारण के तौर पे ये हिंदी में लिखा गया है।

हिंदी भाषा

We also discussed the need of having a proper management for the Alliance or we would be a chaos country later on. So the need arose to assign roles to each and everyone who was present at the First Chandigarh Bloggers Meet-Up as a foundation stone to the structure that we are today.

When you have so many awesome people who possess remarkable talent in multiple dimensions, it becomes hard to contain them under one single title. The best we could do was assign them titles that would describe the more specific way in which they would serve the alliance but allow them complete freedom on the back-end so that they can contribute freely wherever and however they wish to.

Here’s what I came up with:

Titles : Founder Members of C.B.A.

Would you believe it took me 5 hours to finalize this document? Its just not easy to contain these folks like this. But I am proud of myself (and Shanker’s tolerance) that I could do it. You know what to do next; Comments form is just below.

Discussions »

Take a look at your working desk for a moment and ask yourself - Does it really look like a Work Space? Or is it a mess that pulls you back from writing a new post every time you get that urge to kick up your blog? What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) is not just a feature of modern technology and advanced interfaces - It holds true in your everyday life as well. If you’ll see clutter then the ideas and thoughts that you get will be cluttered too.

When I built over 180 RSS subscribers in 21 days of inactivity and then a long recent gap that I took from posting at Inspirit blog- I sometimes had a few minutes to spare when I could sit down, think and write. During all this time, my mom was here - I live in a one room set (rented accommodation) in Chandigarh, so I had to keep a few things on my computer table. And you’d have to believe me, when I sat down to write I just could not focus on the screen with all those books and pens lying on the table along with the keys, the basic telephone and 2 cell phones. I just scribbled in a .txt all that I planned to write about… but didn’t write at all!

I talked to a few friends and fellow-bloggers (Thanks: Anju, Amit and Anshul@Sportscape) about how they maintain their workspace and how do they like to have it. No one likes clutter (that is pretty obvious) but out of laziness, tiredness or any reason, “crap” gathers over time. I have prepared a list of following for the following reasons:

• Distraction

It distracts you from your work. If you’re writing for your blog- you’d find it hard to gather ideas and organize them. Visual clutter causes confusion, brings in inefficiency and results in thought-draining.

• Wastage of Space

If you didn’t have that load of files, books, potato chip bags on your table, you could mount your speakers right there and enjoy soft music when working (or whatever is your taste) - When I cleaned all the mess from my own table, I placed the speakers on my table for a good acoustic experience, a study lamp for my late night sessions so that I can see the keyboard and not disturb my brother sleeping in the same room, the telephone and important project files. So you see how much valuable space the clutter was covering that later became so productive.

• Wastage of Time

Okay, you don’t like clutter, but somehow it is there all over your workspace. You start cleaning it once and realize how much time and muscle you could have saved if you didn’t have it in the first place.

• Wastage of Equipment

I remember how my cell phone got screwed up once when mom accidentally spilled my cup of coffee onto it. The cup was right on the table when the DSL connection wasn’t working and I was mobile-tweeting. The IC’s got short-circuited. Servicing cost me a little over 750 INR.

• Hazardous

Do you realize what kind of irreparable loss those power cables running all over the workspace can cause in case of a mishap. Why not keep the all organized and tied up behind the table? Always take care that cords, etc are out of children’s reach and that they don’t come in your pet’s way. Also take care that you do no keep the switchboards and extension boards on the floor. They might be hazardous as they can give fatal shocks, when someone sweeps the floor clean.

• Organization and Easy Access

Cleaner workspace allows you to have easy access to your notepad, task scheduler, or such important files that you may need to look up frequently. If someone calls you up seeking some kind of information, you’ll be able to find it within a few seconds only if your workspace is clean.

These are reasons enough to find some time on a good day and clear your workspace of all kinds of unnecessary stuff. This will help you enhance your productivity, efficiency of work, will make writing tasks easier with no distractions and fresh uncluttered ideas. I clean my workspace once every 3 days. It is a healthy practice, and if you do it regularly - not much of a pain.

This is my personal workspace. Clean and Clutter-free

How is your workspace like? How often do you clean it? How does the visual clutter affect you and your productivity?
Drop in your comments and share.