Feng Shui and Your Desk

My desk, with Sunshine in one of her favorite places.

Shannon Del Vecchio told me I needed to move my desk.

Shannon was my feng shui consultant, and she was helping me get my office arranged back a number of years ago. I'd read enough about feng shui to know I had the desk poorly placed, but it took Shannon standing there with me to get the change made.

What's a good desk position? Shannon McGinnis discusses this in her new book, The 10-Minute Tidy: 108 Ways to Organize Your Office Quickly. She writes about putting your desk in the empowerment position:

The empowerment position will have you facing the door of the office when you are sitting at your desk. Ideally you would have a solid wall behind you and if your office has windows, it’s great to be able to look outside.

The position of my desk in my home office now meets all of those criteria — and it really does make the office feel great.

So now I really notice desk placement — in the offices I visit, in magazine photos, in catalogs, and on the web. I see many lovely office pictures — and almost all have them have a desk position that feng shui would frown upon. Pictures showing anything other than the desk facing the wall are so rare that I've started bookmarking them when I stumble upon them!




Here's a desk from Ballard Designs.




And here's one from Horchow.




And here's a fun desk from Restoration Hardware.

For a couple more examples, take a look at Unclutterer and Apartment Therapy.

Yes, it's more complicated when you're talking about a desk with a computer, printer, scanner, etc. — and all the cords that often involves. (I still struggle a bit with cord control.) And yes, not all offices will accommodate such desk positioning. But it's worth at least considering whether such an arrangement might work for the office space you have. Try it, and see if it makes a difference to you.

Disclosure: Shannon McGinnis was my roommate at the 2011 NAPO conference, and she gave me a free copy of her latest book, in PDF form.

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Organizing the Tax Records: My Own Story

Tax-related papers. It's easy to be overwhelmed by them, and have them take up an inordinate amount of space.

While you should certainly ask your own tax accountant or tax attorney about his or her recommendations on record retention, I personally follow the guidelines I see most often: Keep the returns themselves forever, and keep all supporting documents for seven years. (That's a general rule; there are exceptions.) And since I've seen conflicting advice on whether or not it's OK to rely on scanned copies, I keep paper originals for all those "last seven years" papers.




But even with this approach, I had much more paper than I wanted, or needed — and I wasn't storing it well. For the last couple years I've been using my ScanSnap to make scans of all tax-related papers, and then filing them in my file cabinet — and that worked well. But before then I'd been keeping my tax-related papers in fireproof boxes, and the boxes were taking up room I wanted for other purposes. And the old tax returns, dating back to the 1980s, were taking up room in my file cabinet.

So this past weekend I finally embarked on my "clean up the tax records" project.

Paper reduction: I scanned all the old returns, after blacking out my social security number and my signature. (I don't need either of these floating around in electronic form.) After making sure I had a good backup in place, I then shredded the returns. I have a very full recycling bin this week!

Improved storage: For returns within the 7-year period, I scanned what had not yet been scanned, and put the papers in my file cabinet — in the space that used to hold all those really old returns. Since I have electronic copies, I'm no longer afraid of losing the originals, and see no need for those fireproof boxes.

I'm not quite done with the project, but it's well underway and I'll finish it this week — and then I'll Freecycle all those boxes.



While all the scanning was a bit tedious, a good scanner (and a good shredder) made things go pretty quickly. And now I have a lot of reclaimed space — and I have all my tax information at my fingertips, in well-organized computer files.

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