The 2-Box Radical Desk Cleanup Method

Is your desk all cluttered and messy and you can't really work on it anymore? Then you should try the 2-Box Radical Desk Cleanup Method!

This method is very simple and only requires two boxes.

Preparation

Get two boxes. One should be large enough to fit all lose items on your desk.

Empty your desk

Put ALL lose items from your desk into box #1. Only things you would expect to be on an empty desk should remain (e.g. laptop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.) on it.

Sort through box #1

Now, take one item out of box #1 and put it where it fially belongs [^1].

There are a few rules for that:

1. If you find an item that you don't need anymore, throw it away or put it in a give-away box to deal with it later.
2. If you need more than 10 seconds to decide where to put an item, put it in box #2.
3. It is OK to put items in the general direction of where the need to be [^2].
4. Under no circumstance should an items go back to the Desk!

Sort through box #2 (optional)

With your desk and box #1 empty, you can now repeat the last step with box #2. Remember to put things where you don't know where to put them in the now empty box #1 [^3].

Do not repeat

As you have sifted through all the stuff twice, it will just waste too much time if you continue sifting through it. Keep this for another day.

Enjoy your clean desk

You now have a clean desk and

[^1]: If you don't have enough time or energy to do this sorting process right now, put the box to the side. You have an empty desk now, on which you can work. If items are missing, you can sift through the box to retrieve them. And this will get annoying enough quite quickly so that your brain will do the effort of properly putting away all the things in the box eventually.

[^2]: For example if you find a dirty spoon but the dishwasher needs to be emptied first, just put it somewhere in the kitchen. If you find nail clippers, which need to go to the bathroom but you're not sure yet where exactly to put them, just put them somewhere in the bathroom. You can deal with these things another time.

[^3]: This is to acommodate for the 80:20 rule. It always takes 20% of the total effort to achieve 80% of your goal, leaving 80% of the effort to finish the last 20%. So there always will be a small amount of items left over after sorting, even if you sorted out your whole flat. But that's OK. At the end it will not be a lot, you will know that those random things are there (and only there!) and most of the stuff you won't need anymore anyway, so you will be able to throw them out at some point in the future.