Last month, Lynn Terry challenged all of us at her Elite forum to clean up/organize our office space: not only out physical space, but our computer desktop, email, hard drive, etc.

The challenge couldn’t have come at a better time for me, as I was already planning to do some virtual organizing: it made me push through and get it all done.

Here is my office before the challenge, and here is how it looks today:

But, my biggest problem wasn’t my physical desk: it was my desktop and email. For example, I had over 1500 unread emails in my inbox: this was not a recent problem, but one going back to more than a year. My inbox didn’t go under 1000 unread messages for an entire year. And I am happy to say that today, I only have the day’s messages.

My desktop was a real mess, with icons overflowing out of the visible area. And I am proud to say that my desktop looks so much better: just need to work on making sure it never gets as cluttered as before.

Here are the before and after pictures for that:

Being organized will help me be a lot more productive. Is your office a mess? Or is it nicely organized?