Detox Your Desktop: Twelve Steps to a Cleaner Desk

Your office desktop. If you work in an office environment, you probably spend a lot of time there. The office desktop becomes an eight-hour-a-day living space, your home away from home. You eat your morning donut on it, as well as rest your coffee mug on it. You might even eat lunch while sitting at your desk.

Other than your bed, you probably spend more time sitting at the office desk than at any other single space in your life.

Some people have desks filled with clutter. Some desks are kept completely bare. Most of us have desktops somewhere between the two. Desks with a pile of papers that need to be filed. Projects that we are working on sit right where we will see them. Usually there are a few pictures of family members and pets, passing as office decor.

A computer is part of the landscape of most desks. The computer and keyboard are being touched constantly.

Whether our desks are cluttered, or tidy, most desks have one thing in common. Most desks could be cleaned more often.

In many offices, the janitors clean the general area, but don't touch the office desk top. If they do wipe off the ofice desk top, you have no way of knowing where else that cleaning rag has been. I saw a TV show last week where they revealed that the cleaning people, who harbored some grudges, used the same cleaning rag on the desks and coffee pot that they used in the toilet. Scary stuff.

While the cleaning people may or may not touch the office desk surfaces, other people do. When you aren't there, people may grab the phone to make a quick call, or drop a new piles of papers on the top of the desk. You may never know who has been at your desk and how clean their hands are.

There are also a lot of airborne bacteria and viruses in an office environment. Co-workers come to work while incubating colds or the flu and their germs live in the air, float around and land on surfaces. These are the same surfaces that you rest a morning snack on.