This year, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo premiered and was one of the most popular shows on Netflix with a whopping approval rating of 91%. It became extremely trendy to follow her methods, even celebrities from around the world have become fans and adopted some of her teachings. One of them, Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan mentioned on Twitter that his wife, Jaya Bachchan gifted him Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and that he is “getting down to it immediately.”

 

While the show started a cleaning revolution within many homes, famously known as the KonMari method, Arvind Raichur, MrOwl CEO, suggests actually applying this same method to your career and workplace environment. The end goal is to use the same central mindset to organize, clear your mind, and find joy in your very own professional life.

 

Here are four ways to help find joy at your current job according to Raichur:

 

1. Search for new opportunities and projects that will spark joy at work

The cornerstone of Kondo’s method is finding things that “spark joy,” and “keeping them”. Everything else that falls short of that standard, you must part with, including a current role or particular negative and disorganized workstation.

Raichur encourages you to introspect and think of the activities that you enjoy doing the most while at work. Once you’ve identified them, you can proactively meet with your boss and discuss the possibility of taking up more of these tasks and responsibilities.

For example, if you love coordinating activities, you could discuss with your manager ways to get more involved in the company’s internal and external events.

He adds, “We often let the small things that don’t matter pile up and weigh us down at work. Things like miscellaneous papers, unread emails, and other day to day tasks that lead to unnecessary stress. By understanding what tasks, you enjoy, adjusting your role to incorporate more of these things, and organizing your workspace, you can easily find more happiness while at work. This typically results in a win-win scenario for both your employers and you, because you’ll be more engaged at work, which in turn means that you will be more productive for the company.”

 

2. Combat organizational flaws directly

He then stresses the importance of organization, “by actively identifying these components and taking organizational measures head-on, you can achieve the highest forms of finding joy the Kondo way”.

Organizing your work life also means decluttering those seemingly endless emails. This specific KonMari method will help free up your inbox, allowing more tranquility and train of thought. Use folders, sub-folders, filters, and archiving to keep it neat and tidy.  Feel free to mark unsolicited email as spam and unsubscribe from the unrequired mailing lists. Ideally, your inbox should contain just the emails that you need to act on. Without the clutter, you will be able to think more freely and make decisions with less stress.

Besides your emails, your desktop serves as not only the “living space” for your computer but is also your lifeline and a key aspect of your workplace environment. MrOwl, a Social Cloud Storage™ platform, can help you to easily clean up that pile of scattered documents that’s cluttering up your desktop and turn it into a searchable and shareable collection that will help to simplify your work life.  On MrOwl, consumers create private or public collections of information that can be organized with subtopics, documents, links, media and more.  You can add collaborators to shared projects, and manage everything on the go with MrOwl’s mobile application so that you can have what you need no matter where you are.

 

3. Use organizational methods to plan for the future and set new goals

Visualization is another key component of the KonMari method. To be successful, you must visualize your ideal work life and bring it to fruition. Use the same methodology you applied to organizing your documents and emails to visualizing the next steps in your career. To do this, start by thinking about your future work goals.

This mini brainstorming session will only take a few minutes and requires you to write down your goals and answers. Make an assessment about how you would like others to see you at work. How do you want to feel when you walk into the office every day? How do you want to grow? Raichur recommends that you don’t just mark each goal as a success when completed, but to break them into incremental checkpoints to celebrate the small wins in-between.  You can easily organize and keep track of your goals by uploading your list onto MrOwl or use their “note” feature. This will ensure that you can edit and have your list handy at any time.

 

4. Fully commit to the minimalist lifestyle 

Lastly, for one to reach their highest levels in the Kondo Method, one must fully commit to the minimalist lifestyle. Transform yourself to encourage more productivity at work and commit to it. “Sticking to the minimalist method in your professional life should help inspire you to improve your focus every day,” Raichur said.

To achieve this, take incremental breaks to lower stress, experiment with new regimens on how you get work done, stay away from sites that could take you down a rabbit hole, find new sites that can help keep you entertained and productive like MrOwl, and ask your work colleagues to hold off on any pop culture gossip until afterhours.

With these simple steps, you can achieve finding joy the Marie Kondo way.