How to Use Feng Shui to Organize Your Library or Study

The place in your house where you test your mental processes greater than any other should lend itself to optimal use of your mind with minimal interference. Your study is not a surrogate storeroom/utility room or electronics repository, though often you will see someone’s home office or study as a nondescript junk heap with a narrow path to a cluttered desk and odd chair. Clean up your act and watch your output and income soar.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. The key center of power in the study will be your desk. It should be opposite from the entrance to the room, but not stuck in the corner. Organize your study around this central focusing point. Set the desk up to more or less face the entrance with sufficient space around the desk for you to walk around it in either direction.
2. The top of the desk should be free of clutter, but not necessarily totally empty. There should be room to work and to spread out a spiral notebook, magazine or book in addition to your laptop. If you have a desktop computer in your study, use a separate computer table, but don’t just stick the computer cabinet under the desk.
3. Ask yourself if you can walk through your study and dust everything with a dusting wand in a few minutes without causing any disturbance yet effectively covering every surface. Better yet imagine a strong draft blasting through the room. If you would have to spend the rest of the day picking up trinkets, papers and all kinds of incidental small items, it’s time to turn your study upside down and start over.
4. Look around. What can you see that doesn’t need to be there. The question to ask yourself is whether any of these items are there only because you didn’t have a filing or storage system in place to hold them. Or you just dropped it there because there was some open space and you never bothered to do anything else about it. Maybe it’s time to bring in a wide-mounted trash container and start throwing out anything you can do without. You will never be able to create anything great in your study when it is effectively serving the purpose of a sponge to soak up every bit of energy that comes in the door where it will become stale and stagnant.
5. Bookshelves are often the most abused furniture in the house. They break the dusting rule more than anything, especially what you place on top. The shelves should show deliberate intent, with books the same sizes grouped together and all pulled out evenly to the front edge of the shelf--never pushed back as far as possible with junk piled on the edge of the shelves in front of the books.
6. Minimize the electronics in your study. Of course you have the printer, fax, maybe a small television and VCR or DVR, UPS, stereo speakers, maybe both a laptop and desktop computer. But anything else is probably too much. Clean off the hard disk drive of that 10-year-old Pentium and give it away. The space serves you better being open and free of clutter and radiation.
7. Furniture should be limited to two or three bookshelves, but no more than two walls of shelves (which is far more than optimal). A chair or small couch, filing cabinet, computer table and perhaps one other somewhat austere upright place to sit is all you can afford to house in that room. Your desk chair should get a lot of attention and care when deciding on where you will rest your body while so much that is important is expected to happen.
8. Lighting is often overlooked. Make sure this room is well lit with variable degrees of lighting to cover every angle and location. Never allow your eyes to strain in this room. A desk lamp is appropriate, with a couple of tall reflecting lamp stands. If you have a good ceiling light installed, maybe only a desk lamp will be required, but don’t depend only on the overhead light. If you have florescent lighting in the ceiling, either leave it off or install full spectrum tubes.
9. Unlike the bedroom and living room, wooden or even plastic blinds are appropriate in this room. Minimize the dimensions of window treatments. No drapes or even light curtains, but maybe some material across the top of the windows for decoration can be used if it doesn’t interfere with the general blandness and understated surrounding that this room should reflect.
10. Pay close attention to the way light flows into this room from outside. Keep the windows very clean and think about how energy is allowed in or blocked out for security, privacy and favorable energy flow.
11. Wiring should not wind all over the room or under any furniture. Carefully plan and manage all cabling and wiring so that it is out of sight as much as possible.
12. Floor space should be open for easy cleaning and good energy flow. Never stack junk or even what you consider important materials on the floor. The floor is never to be used as another shelf or staging area if you want to have the best results in this room.
13. Artwork should be minimal, especially if you have a lot of bookshelves. Keep any artwork on the walls small and simple, not distracting or engaging. Your framed degrees and a few small pictures of the family, especially older or deceased members, are appropriate. Change and rotate regularly and often.
14. Cleanse the room often with a 7-metal bell. Smudge cleanse seldom, slightly or never.

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