Joy at Work ~ What We Know So Far
April 2020 is going to be another big month for Marie Kondo. Her world famous KonMari Method, which has helped so many people improve their home life through her unique approach to decluttering and organisation, is now extending into the workplace.
“Joy at Work will help you overcome the challenges of workplace mess and enjoy the productivity, success, and happiness that comes with a tidy desk and mind.”
Publisher’s Description
Release date and authors:
Joy at Work will be released in the U.K. and USA on April 7th 2020. The book will combine advice on how to effectively declutter your physical workspace, your digital life, your social network, and perhaps most importantly your time, with key data about how this contributes to an efficient work environment. Marie has teamed up with Scott Sonenshein, an organisational psychologist and professor at Rice University. He has spent his career researching how work spaces function well and how our brains connect with the way we work. His award winning research, teaching, and consulting has helped Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals. In 2017, he released his book Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less.
I’m looking forward to the content of Joy at Work because it will offer clear guidance and inspiration on how you can transform your work environment and apply KonMari principles to managing your work projects, time and network. Not only this, through collaborating with Scott Sonenshein, we can expect to gain a deeper psychological understanding to the delcuttering process, which has not really been explored in full in Marie’s previous books. Both authors combine their passion for less is more, and how owning less enables a clearer mindset, which is something I experience with my clients, both one-to-one clients and corporate clients, again and again.
What we know about ‘Stretch: Unlock the Power of less’ by Scott Sonenshein
Stretch reveals when we have an accumulation driven mindset as a colleague, team or entire organisation, constantly investing in resources that we hope will improve our work practices, research shows that we actually move away from our goals. This he calls a ‘chasing mindset’. In contrast, he advocates working in a space of scarcity. According to Sonenshein’s research, working in a space of scarcity allows us to zone in on our goals, encourages us to think outside the box and actually leads to us becoming more successful. This he calls a ‘stretch mindset’. When stretching, we embrace the resources we already have and this frees us to find creative and productive ways to solve problems, innovate, and engage our work and lives more fully.
For more information about his work, I recommend watching his Google Talk. Using studies and stories, in this talk Sonenshein shows that organisations that survive and thrive have one thing in common: they act resourcefully, taking however little, or even how much, they have, and creating even greater value with it.
“As a business professor, I know too many emails, wasteful meetings and team conflict take the joy out of work. I'm excited to pair my research as an organisational psychologist with the KonMari Method to give people the techniques, advice and inspiration to experience joy in all parts of their careers.”
Scott Sonenshein
Joy at Work sneak peak:
Joy at Work adapts Marie’s inspirational KonMari Method for the workplace, and will take you step-by-step through your professional environment so you can find the most joyful way to work for you. Some of the chapters you can expect to read are:
‘Marie Kondo your Desk at Work’
‘Tidying Time’
‘Tidying Meetings’
‘Tidying Teams’
‘Tidying your Network’
‘What to do if you Keep Falling Back to Clutter’
“This book offers stories, studies and strategies to help you eliminate clutter and make space for work that really matters.”
Marie Kondo
Once you find order in your work life, you can feel empowered to find the confidence, motivation and energy to move away from negative work habits and create the career you want. KonMari is not a quick fix. Once you have put in the effort to organise your environment and re-calibrate your priorities, you can experience a change in mindset so powerful that you feel nothing but an ongoing desire to maintain it. After witnessing this powerful change many times with clients in their homes and work environments myself, I have no doubt that this book will make a positive contribution.
Written by Katrina Hassan (Gold Certified KonMari Consultant at Spark Joy London)