For this assignment, I decided to try the “joy test” on the desk in my dorm. I have a bad habit of letting loose papers, trash and other things clutter my desk so having an excuse to clean it is always a good thing. I haven’t cleaned my desk since the beginning of the semester, when I moved all of my stuff into the desk. Over the course of half a semester, most of the desk’s space has been claimed by something or another. Whether that be the large laptop I use for my classwork, the textbooks that cluster into a pile in the corner or the many papers scattered around the desk, it can be difficult to find room to do work on the desk itself. 

I’ve cleaned off my desk before, so I had a pretty good idea of where to start. I usually look through all of the objects on and inside the desk and see if I need to keep them and, if I do, is there another place I can put them to keep my workspace more orderly. This time around I tried taking a mental note about the emotions that arose as I cleaned off my desk, not just the usual thoughts of practicality I use when cleaning normally.

I started by looking through the loose papers on the desk, as those are usually the easiest to clean off (oftentimes they’re either on the desk for a reason or they’re just old trash). I went through many old assignments that could be thrown away, I found some old notes I had taken for a class and put them in my notebook, and I threw away some old candy wrappers that were still on the desk. I even found a copy of the syllabus for this very class, which was quite ironic. However there were some objects that surprised me, such as a card I received from my parents and some notes I had jotted down for a potential video game idea, that did spark joy when I found them. For the most part I had forgotten about these items, and seeing them again brought about a joyful feeling. I put the card back on my desk and I put the game notes into my drawer in case I ever wanted to act on my idea.

After reviewing the papers on my desk, I started looking towards the larger items on my desk. This is where I found the most objects that “sparked joy” for me. I found the bracelet that my girlfriend gave to me, a set of dice that I use when playing DnD with some friends, and a metal sign that I hadn’t hung up in my room at the start of the semester (which I then hung up in a moment of procrastination). There were some things that I threw away, such as an old 3D printed project that I no longer needed and some pencils that had been sharpened down to stubs, but most of these larger items sparked joy for me. The one object, or rather group of objects, that defies this rule for me is the pile of textbooks on my desk. I never really use textbooks for my classes, as if I have a question on the material I prefer to talk to the professor or a classmate about it rather than search through a textbook for a possible solution. Looking back on it, the action of renting the textbooks at all now feels like a waste of money, since I’ve never used them unless the class specifically required it. I put the textbooks in my desk drawer, that way I knew where they’d be when I needed to return them but they stopped taking up room on my desk. I now feel like there is much more space on the desk now that a quarter of it isn’t being taken up by books I wasn’t using. 

After cleaning off my desk, I feel like I have much more room to do my work. To be honest I don’t feel very different about how I see the objects on my desk, but that may be due to the fact that I tend to go object by object when cleaning off my desk normally. That being said, it was interesting to pay attention to the feelings that emanate while holding certain objects. I’ll be sure to listen to this feeling in the future, since it can help with deciding what objects to keep in the future.