What will your colleagues find in your office drawer, on your desk, closet, wardrobe, office warehouse, etc. if today you are suddenly… gone?
The average office employee wastes 1.5 hours a day, 6 weeks per year, looking for things, shows a study of University of Scranton. Stress and irritation, leading to additional loss of efficiency and productivity are not even accounted for.
To sweep away the waste, enter Swedish death cleaning — a trending lifestyle topic in the minimalists community! The star of the day is Margareta Magnusson, an 80-something Swedish artist and author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (book is released in English in January 2018). Behind the startling headline emerges the Swedish custom of döstädning. “Dö” is for death, “städning” is for cleaning, writes the book. In Swedish it is a term that means removing unnecessary things and making your home nice and orderly when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet.
The insight is that performing death cleaning on your home and possessions and removing the junk of unnecessary stuff can be, in fact, beneficial for every age and every person. We, at the C-Suite Minimalists, invite you to apply this in an office environment. The point is not to make you scared, rather to come back to those 1.5 hours a day, 6 weeks per year, wasted looking for things — a pen, a paper, a report, a toothbrush…
Look around your workplace and think: what will your colleagues find in your office drawer, on your desk, closet, wardrobe, office warehouse, etc. if today you are suddenly… gone? By “gone” don’t necessarily think of death. Sudden layoff, move to another department or promotion are equally plausible alternatives.
Cleaning everything unnecessary, the döstädning way, can be a gruesome, but rewarding experience. Margareta Magnusson does not recommend to throw everything away. By all means, keep a small box of valuable to you belongings from the office that you can easily carry away when the time comes to move on. In the meantime enjoy a cleaner, friendlier, cozier and more productive office environment.
*If you wish to share your experience of Swedish Death Cleaning in the office, we will appreciate if you use #thecsuiteminimalists
**If you learned something new here and you wish to use it, feel free, but please be kind to quote The C-Suite Minimalists.
***See here Margareta Magnusson explaining Swedish death cleaning in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/embed/fXj3iy1Sgc4