When people think about spring cleaning, they usually think of closet clutter, junk drawers, and unopened piles of mail. It’s true that every workspace can use a good deep cleaning, but the most important workspace is your head. Your mind. Your brain. Noggin. Noodle. Dome. You get it: there’s mental clutter and physical clutter, and it’s important to keep yourself free of both.

Just like real spring cleaning with mops and rooms and vacuums, for dusting off your workspace there’s plenty of tools to choose from. Read on to learn how to spring clean your office space, whether that’s a desk or the space between your ears:

1. Deep Clean Your Desk
2. Clean Your Digital Space
3. Set a Timer for Tasks
4. Make Meditation a Priority

Tip #1: Deep Clean Your Desk

Desks are like a home away from home (or in the home for remote workers). They carry all the necessities — laptops, pens, planners and two day old cups of coffee. They’re perfect. But like everything else, they aren’t exempt from a good deep clean.

• Take everything — seriously, everything — off of the desk space and do a really thorough scrub with some disinfectant.
• Then tackle those monitors with a cleaning solution and microfiber cloth to get them shiny and speck-free for the first time in months (or maybe lightyears).
• Finally, now that everything is off the desk and the space is spick-and-span, tackle those piles and piles of papers. What needs to be filed? What needs to be saved? What deserves a date with the shredder?

Once you’ve done the “dirty work” (or is it “clean work”?) you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy a sparkling clean space…before getting right back to work.

Rocketbook Tip: Want to skip the step of organizing piles of papers. Try a reusable Rocketbook notebook. You can save your notes online, and erase the pages to be reused again.

Tip #2: Clean Your Cloud Space

Workspace cleaning doesn’t apply to just desks — the online office deserves a good scrub, too. There’s three key areas that should be looked at for file cleaning: (1) the desktop, (2) the Cloud, and (3) the emails.

• Most desktop homepages look the same: there’s two important files there, and the rest of the page is filled with screenshots, old email attachments, and gifs. Remove those unnecessary files and move the important ones into folders.
• Next, tackle your Cloud storage. Delete old and unneeded files, and create a new organization system for yourself that will make online organization clean and crisp, rather than a jumbled mess.
• Now that you’ve gotten good at taking out the digital trash, it’s time to head to your email server. Toss those daily newsletters, unanswered sales pitches, and straight up spam to the bin — you’ll feel so much better that you did.

Spring Cleaning Tip: Eliminate your email clutter down with the Inbox Zero method. Check out our podcast, The Betterment Experiment, to hear our co-founders talk about testing it out for a week.

Tip #3: Set a Timer for Tasks

Decluttering also applies to time — cut out the clutter from your schedule by setting a task timer.

• Turn finishing a task like answering emails, completing a project, or finally exercising into a non-negotiable item in your planner.
• When the timer starts, your only priority is to do the task in front of you. No sneak peaks at phones, social media, or emails allowed.
• This hyper-focused task management process keeps you streamlined and focused, so you can finish what’s important first before taking on anything else.

By taking on one thing at a time rather than 50, you’ll produce stronger results and a clearer mind.

Spring Cleaning Tip: Learn to master the art of scheduling with time-blocking. 

Tip #4: Make Meditation a Must

Finally, it’s time to declutter your head with some meditation practice. You don’t have to be a yogi to meditate — all you need is a quiet space and some time. Yes, that even means you can do meditation at the office! Just find an empty conference room and you’ll be good to go.

• Follow a guided meditation, or just take five to ten minutes to yourself to breathe in deep, relax your mind and let yourself be.
• Meditation helps you center yourself and wind down, so we’d especially recommend this if you often find yourself feeling overwhelmed with work.
• If you aren’t sure about it at first, give it a couple more tries — like many things, meditation just gets better with time.

Spring Cleaning Factoid: Jake — our co-founder — swears by meditation after first calling it “hocus pocus”.

Happy Spring! Happy Cleaning!

Use these tips to guide you on a deep clean in all corners of your life. These tips don’t just work on workspaces and headspaces in the Spring. Refer back to this blog all year round to make your life more organized, efficient and easy. Here’s to some tidy productivity!