Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Theo Theobald and Cary Cooper must be one of the oddest pairings in publishing. A Californian academic and media-darling and a streetwise Scouser with quick wit, a no-nonsense approach and a business network to die for.
Theo Theobald is a freelance writer and sometime business professional, with a career that includes BBC management and advertising copywriting. He now runs his own company, Shocktactic Limited, writing and lecturing on management., lifestyle and human interaction. He describes himself as tirelessly enthusiastic and endlessly optimistic and admits that this can be 'a bit irritating'.

Cary Cooper, CBE, is Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School, and Pro Vice Chancellor of Lancaster University. he is President of the British Association of counseling and Psychotherapy, former President o the British Academy of Management, a Patron of the National Phobic Society and an Ambassador of The Samaritans. He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles. He was awarded the CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2001 for his contribution to organizational health.

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Why is there never enough time in the day to do all the stuff you want to?

Why does your in-tray just keep growing?

Is it alive?

Written for the time-starved and terminally untidy, Detox Your Desk is the perfect antidote to pressure cooker of the modern office. It's flat out but you still fell like you're not getting anything done. And no wonder. It's hard to do anything meaningful when you're swamped by piles of paperwork and endless 'to do' lists.

Detox Your Desk helps you fight back by purging your system office toxins, so you can take control of the everyday stuff and calmly field whatever lands in your in-tray.

It starts with the physical clearing out of all the rubbish that litters your life and then gives you practical tips to help free up your thinking. Detox Your Desk puts you on a ten-day programme that'll result in a tidy workspace and a clear head. All of the changes are easy. Stick with them over the long term and you'll change the way you work forever, giving you more time and a greater choice in every area of you life.

This you big chance to get on top of your workload and start to enjoy work and life again. You'll soon be the most efficient and effective person you know!

Aus dem Klappentext

Why is there never enough time in the day to do all the stuff you want to?

Why does your in-tray just keep growing?

Is it alive?

Written for the time-starved and terminally untidy, Detox Your Desk is the perfect antidote to pressure cooker of the modern office. It's flat out but you still fell like you're not getting anything done. And no wonder. It's hard to do anything meaningful when you're swamped by piles of paperwork and endless 'to do' lists.

Detox Your Desk helps you fight back by purging your system office toxins, so you can take control of the everyday stuff and calmly field whatever lands in your in-tray.

It starts with the physical clearing out of all the rubbish that litters your life and then gives you practical tips to help free up your thinking. Detox Your Desk puts you on a ten-day programme that'll result in a tidy workspace and a clear head. All of the changes are easy. Stick with them over the long term and you'll change the way you work forever, giving you more time and a greater choice in every area of you life.

This you big chance to get on top of your workload and start to enjoy work and life again. You'll soon be the most efficient and effective person you know!

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Detox Your Desk

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

The idea of time travel appeals to us all; it opens up possibilities of a fantasy world where we could be whoever we wanted in the past, or live a different existence in the future. Such a fantastic flight of fancy attracted the attention of H.G. Wells when he wrote The Time Machine, and persists right through to today with Doctor Who.

But fantasy it is. We're stuck with the time when we're born. With luck, we get the average of about 75 years, then it's all handed over to the next generation, with whom we lost any faith a long time ago. That 'three score and ten and a bit extra' time slot sets the context for our lives; it's the backdrop against which we exist and it is highly significant in our pursuit of happiness and fulfilment, because we judge our ability to achieve our ideals within our own generation. Success is a relative term, according to our own era. To get a sense of perspective, we're going to use the next section to compare the present to the past, both in terms of work and life in general.

What would it have been like a couple of generations ago? For most of us, even trying to imagine how our grandparents lived is really hard.

Certainly, there wasn't nearly as much material wealth. Only the privileged few drove cars, work was hard and long (okay some things haven't changed!), poverty was rife, hygiene standards were poor, life expectancy was much shorter and rates of infant mortality were much higher. For men, most of the time was spent working to provide shelter and enough food for the family; women, too, toiled tirelessly, giving birth to and bringing up the next generation, without the assistance of automatic washing machines, effective detergents, fridges, microwaves or a thousand other things we take for granted. Frankly, they must have been knackered most of the time.

So, when it was all such a struggle, literally just to stay alive (side-stepping malnutrition or starvation, avoiding disease, cheating the grim reaper), how much time do you think they spent deciding between whether to install another en-suite or have decking put down in the back garden?

This isn't to criticize our generation's level of aspiration or desire for material wealth; it's just an attempt to show how increased prosperity releases us from the concerns our ancestors had; we seem to have replaced this with our own problems.

The future is a mystery, but we can look back and learn some lessons. When life was much harder, there was considerably less time to worry about our modern obsessions, the greatest of which seems to be ourselves. How likely is it that you'd have heard your granddad in the Working Men's Club confessing to his pals, 'I can't quite put my finger on it, but I just don't feel "centred" at the moment', or his wife confiding in a friend that she sometimes found it hard to cope with the burden of guilt around balancing her kids and her career (especially when she quite often, secretly preferred her career)?

Self obsession is the burden of our generation, just as rickets and impetigo (a couple of long-gone ailments) were in theirs. Rather than lament what we've become, we should be more inclined to celebrate the fact that the difficulties we face are much less than those of past generations. Which of them wouldn't have swapped their 'tin bath' for a whirlpool Jacuzzi-action hot tub? Or for that matter, our worries about long working hours versus theirs on the possibility of no working hours.

If we have become collectively more egocentric, we shouldn't be ashamed; it's simply about facing up to the norms of the time we're living in, and in exactly the same way that our ancestors 'got on and made the best of it', so should we. Nor should we think that selflessness is a thing of the past, or that mankind as a whole can't be redeemed from itself and act according to the benefit of all its citizens. To do that though, the journey has to start with us. Start small, focus on what's going on here at home, and change ourselves and our lifestyles in a positive and enduring way, right now, for a better version of us than we've been used to in the past, and who knows what impact that might have on people around us? Really, that is what this detox is about.

But does it work? So far everyone who has tried it has reported positive, long-lasting benefits with no apparent negative side effects! The results show an increase in efficiency with the benefit of freeing up more time; when this is used productively, through making conscious choices, levels of satisfaction have risen; we've even had reports of people indulging in 'a long leisurely stroll' or 'a couple of hours with the Sunday papers'.

Every generation has its own set of adversities to cope with. Who knows what'll happen to the next lot, with their huge advances in technology, but with their social problems and conflicts? One fact remains, which is humanity's ability to adapt and survive.

No amount of wishing for a time machine will make it appear. Instead we should just accept the hand that has been dealt to us and make the very best of it. We can't change our time, but we can change ourselves; doing it through detox can mean we have the best of times.

GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT

Because of the way work was a few generations ago, the vast majority of people regarded it as a necessary evil.

There must have been those who enjoyed their jobs; craftsmen surely got satisfaction from a productive day's work; so too in the professions you'd imagine that carrying out your duties to the best of your ability resulted in you feeling like it had been worth turning up.

The overwhelming sense, though, is that there was a very clear division between what happened in the workplace and what happened at home. The factory hooter, signalling the end of the working day, was a reality for many, and it would seem that the spirit of it (i.e. a sense that work was finished), was a part of all jobs.

The division is not nearly so clear now. By looking at what has changed, we can get a real sense of the challenges that face us today; understanding 'what we're up against' is the first step to finding some modern solutions, which is what detoxing your desk aims to help with.

A BRIEF MODERN HISTORY OF WORK

Around the time of the industrial revolution, when mass production started to signal mass employment, the balance of power in the workplace sat firmly with the entrepreneurs who ran the businesses. There were few binding contracts of employment and workers had little or nothing in the way or rights. Much of the manual labour that was employed came on a casual basis, sometimes daily.

There's an expression on Merseyside that has survived until today, but has its roots in these working practices and goes a long way to summing up the conditions at the time.

If you want to insult someone on Merseyside (and be sure to think carefully about whether or not you do) you'd say 'der's nothin'downf'yer', translated as 'there's nothing down for you'. This implies that someone is a waster, a useless layabout (as we said, choose carefully!). In the days when the Liverpool docks were thriving, workers turned up each morning and went to see the charge-hand, who had a master list of...