Clutter kills practices, so practice killing clutter
A cluttered desk is a sign of...potential danger!
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? ”
Good ol' Al is one of our favorite philosophers; however, on this point we must diverge.
As stated in my inaugural post, our emphasis for this blog is where technology and practice meet. To that end, in the context of all the (never ending) news of identity fraud, we turn our attention to that low tech vector that haunts us all, the cluttered desk.
Regardless of whether you agree with the smartest man to have ever lived or with your humble (and definitely not the smartest man that ever lived), the reality is that a messy desk is a potential problem for us and our clients.
I am a fellow practitioner, and understand the tension between putting papers away at the end of the day (or more realistically, end of the late-night) versus the efficiency of leaving your "fires" where they are so you can jump right back into fighting them after the obligatory 4 hours of rest.
And yet, the cold hard reality is that this is a problem that we need to deal with.
Here are some things that we've done that may be of use to you:
1) We created a "clean room." This is a place in our office that is separate from the file room, staff offices, and other areas. There are no files or computers - except what we bring in for that particular meeting.
2) We have locks on all the office doors and filing cabinets.
3) We shred every piece of paper and/or mail once we're done with it.
4) We are in the process of scanning all of our files into the cloud so the hard copies can either be shredded or returned to clients. This will eventually allow us to get rid of some filing cabinets and free up space for more staff.
OK - you may or may not be able to take any or all of the above steps, here's one other thing that we did for your consideration:
5) We terminated the contract with our janitorial services provider. We clean up after ourselves. (Saves money, too!)
We totally get it - taking out your own trash, cleaning your own bathroom - it can be a drag. But if it's not possible to adhere to a clean desk policy, you still have to do something. Limiting the number of people that have access to your office and controlling their movements when they are in your office is critical to protecting our clients' sensitive documents.
Einstein, by the way, was too intimidated by our tax system to take them on; he famously said [of taxes], "The math is way too complicated; it would take a philosopher" - that's you and me. We can ditch the clutter and still have high functioning minds - and practices.