Joy at Work Quotes

“Just like us, books have a peak period in their lives. That’s when they should be read, but it’s quite common for people to miss that timing.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“a messy environment taxes the brain. When surrounded by clutter, our brains are so busy registering all the things around us that we can’t focus on what we should be doing in the moment, such as tackling the work on our desk or communicating with others. We feel distracted, stressed, and anxious, and our decision-making ability is impaired.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Clutter also adversely affects health. According to a study by scientists at UCLA, being surrounded by too many things increases cortisol levels, a primary stress hormone”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Another way of building trust is to authentically delegate. Don't assign someone work and then constantly monitor their progress and ignore their ideas.”
― Scott Sonenshein, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“When deciding how to spend your time, remember: Don’t trade an activity you’d love to pursue for a reward you don’t value.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“you’ll need to be more precise and identify in clear, concrete terms your ideal approach to work and the effects you hope tidying will have on your life. So before you start, visualize your ideal work life.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: The Life-Changing Magic of Organising Your Working Life

“When we tell ourselves that we have to do something, it feels like a chore. But when we see tidying as a creative endeavor that will spark joy in our workspace, we're happy to do it.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“No matter what your ideal work life is, the final goal is the same: to be able to work with joy. So when tidying up, what matters most is to choose things that contribute to your happiness and appreciate what you keep.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“The goal of the method shared in this book is not just to have a nice neat desk but to begin a dialogue with yourself through tidying - to discover what you value by exploring why you are working in the first place and what of working style you want. This process will help you see how each task you do is linked to a joyful future.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Important tasks are different. There are big positive outcomes for performing them or big negative consequences for not performing them. Examples include personal development, for instance, through reading and education; updating a product; and developing a good relationship with colleagues.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“There’s a reason why we usually prioritize urgent tasks over important ones. Important tasks tend to be more difficult to complete than urgent ones, making us more reluctant to start them. Urgent tasks have a more immediate payoff, making them more enticing to start and pleasing to finish. If you’re trying to feel good—at least in the short term—checking off an urgent task makes sense. In the long term, however, you’re not doing the type of work that really matters to your career and company.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“When you step into a meeting, you’re entering a shared space for collaboration, decision-making, and exchanging ideas. Treasure this space, and it will turn into a source of joy.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“The findings of these studies can be summarized in three simple points. A tidy desk results in a higher evaluation of our character and capacity. This raises our self-esteem and increases our motivation. As a result, we work harder and our performance improves.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“The Vicious Cycle of Accumulating Clutter
Research shows that clutter decreases the joy we feel at work for two main reasons. First, it overwhelms the brain. The more stuff we have around us, the more overloaded the brain becomes. This makes it harder for us to recognize, experience, and savor those things that are most important to us - the things that bring us joy.
Second, when we are inundated with things, information, and tasks, we lose our sense of control and the ability to choose. No longer capable of taking the initiative or choosing our actions, we forget that work is a mean for realizing our dreams and aspirations and lose our love for our job. To make matters worse, when people feel they are no longer in control, they begin to accumulate more unwanted stuff while also struggling with a sense of guilt and pressure to do something about it. The result? They put off dealing with their stuff indefinitely, generating a vicious cycle of ever-increasing cluttler.
S.S.”
― Scott Sonenshein, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Now, within the “Documents” area, including its underlying folders, examine each file and ask yourself: Do I need this document to get my job done? Will this document provide me with guidance or inspiration for future work? Does this document spark joy? If the answer is no to all these questions, delete the document.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Sometimes people ask me how many books they should keep, but there's no fixed number. For books, and for other categories, too, the amount that feels right will differ for each individual. The real benefit of tidying up is that it helps you identify your own personal standard.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Those who multitask often do so not because they're particularly good at it but because they struggle to block out distractions and focus on a single task.”
― Scott Sonenshein, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“So, when you decide not to keep something, focus on the good it brought you and let it go with gratitude for the connection you had with it. The positive energy you direct at that item will attract new and joyful encounters. The same principle applies when considering a job...”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“We can shorten our workdays and add joy to our work if we learn to get ahold of activity clutter. Activity clutter comes from the things we do that take up precious time and sap our energy but don’t make a meaningful difference to our personal, professional, or even company’s mission. These things include meetings that don’t produce new information or better decisions, projects with little chance of being completed, and painstakingly polished presentations that lack substantive content. On average, we spend less than half our workday on our main job responsibilities, with the rest of our time taken up by interruptions, nonessential tasks, administrative tasks, emails, and meetings. How did we end up like this? Fortunately, psychology provides some answers. There are three traps that can lead to activity clutter: overearning by working too hard for the wrong results, prioritizing urgent tasks over important ones, and multitasking.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“the more time you spend on email, the lower your productivity and the higher your stress levels.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Everyone’s job has different requirements, but the three main folders I use should fit many types of work. Current projects, with a subfolder for each project. (You should try to keep these to no more than ten. After all, how many of us are simultaneously working on more than ten projects? If you are, you’ll learn in the next chapter how to tidy your time.) Records, which contain policies and procedures you regularly access. Usually, these files are provided by others and you typically don’t modify them. Examples include legal contracts and employee files. Saved work, which consists of documents from past projects that you’ll use in the future. Examples include files that can help you with new projects, like a presentation from a previous client that can be a good template for a future one. Other types of saved work can include research you’ve done that could be helpful later, such as benchmarking of competitors or industry research. You may also want to save some projects to have a portfolio to show to prospective clients or new employees for training purposes. If you keep personal files in the same space, add a “Personal” folder so you don’t intermingle personal and work files. Keep digital documents organized. Staying organized is much easier once you have a small set of intuitive, primary folders. If you decide to keep a new file, put it in the most appropriate folder. Otherwise, delete it. The usefulness of your folders will improve as you consistently place similar files in the same place and keep only what you need. When projects are done, decide whether they warrant being moved to your “Saved Work” folder or if you can discard them. There’s no need to store records such as company policies if they’re accessible in other places or won’t be needed again.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“When choosing what to keep and what to let go, refer to the criteria introduced here: things that directly spark joy, those that provide functional joy, and those that lead to future joy.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“To face the things we own through tidying is to confront our past. There will be times when we regret our purchases or feel embarrassed by our decisions. But to face these feelings honestly and let things go with gratitude for teaching us what we really need is to acknowledge our past choices. By constantly repeating the mental process of identifying what we truly want and deciding what to do on the basis of what brings us joy, we acquire a positive perspective that affirms every choice we make.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“As a rule, don’t store anything on top of your desk. Your desktop is a work surface, not a storage cupboard, so the rule of thumb is to store nothing on it. Pick a spot in your drawers and on your shelves for each item or category. As much as possible, the only things on your desk should be whatever you need right now for the project you are working on. Keep this image of a clear desktop in your mind when you start storing. People who do so usually finish with only a laptop and an ornament or potted plant on their desk. Designate a storage space even for things you use daily, such as a pen or memo pad. My clients are often surprised to find that it’s not inconvenient at all to store these things out of sight when not in use. Once they experience how a neat and tidy desk enables them to focus on their work, they quickly become addicted to that state.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“The amount of storage space in a desk is very limited, so you’ll want to maximize its effectiveness. Boxes are great for this. You can use boxes of various sizes as drawer dividers. Store items in the same category in one that suits their size and shape, such as a small box for items like flash drives and a medium-sized box for personal-care items like supplements. Small things in particular store better when they are arranged upright in a box rather than placed directly in a drawer with no dividers. The box keeps them from disintegrating into an anonymous heap and lets you see at a glance where things are when you open the drawer.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“It’s important not to scatter storage for things in the same category. Storing everything in the same category in the same place lets you see at a glance how much you have. This has added benefits. Once you know what you have, you no longer accumulate excess or buy unnecessary items.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Papers can be broadly divided into three categories: pending, save because you have to, and save because you want to.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“The trick is to imagine in vivid, motion-picture detail what your whole day will look like after you finish tidying up. That image should include three elements: the physical environment, your behavior, and your feelings. Visualize what your workspace looks like, such as your neat and tidy desk and where everything is stored; what you do there, including such things as enjoying a cup of coffee or refreshing aromas; and what you feel when you do that: for example, excited, fulfilled, or content.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“the greatest loss is the time spent looking for them. Data show that the search for lost things adds up to an average of one workweek per year per employee. In a span of four years, that comes to a whole month. In the United States alone, this loss in productivity when converted to cash amounts to an estimated US$89 billion annually. This is more than double the combined profit of the world’s five largest corporations. These figures are staggering, but this is the reality. The effects of clutter can be devastating. Still, there’s no need to worry. All these problems can be solved by tidying up.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life

“Finally, I consulted Jinnosuke Kokoroya, a well-known therapist in Japan. He also happens to be an old friend, and our families enjoy spending time together. “I’d really like to start using social media to get my message out there,” I told him, “but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m afraid that people might hate me and start attacking me.” Jinnosuke smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Marie. Plenty of people hate you already.” This, by the way, is what he tells all his clients who are afraid of being hated. That’s his approach.”
― Marie Kondō, Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life