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The Tao of Computers
 

Cutting the Clutter With a Little Feng Shui
June 15, 2007
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From the Asian Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Flagstaff
Original online article
 

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Only one person can make me move my computer desk around and that's Arif Chang, my feng shuimaster.

Well, he's not really my feng shui master because I've only met him once, but when my wife let him into the house and he wandered into my study I knew I'd have to do whatever he said. My wife had been impressed by Mr. Chang's work with a friend of ours (I'll spare you the details, but it involved parents being kicked out of their home and a guy proposing) and thought we could benefit from his wisdom. I, as usual, was skeptical, but had little say in the matter.
 

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So when Mr. Chang's first remark upon looking at my study was "messy," I realized (a) that I didn't really like feng shui practitioners and (b) that my beloved, sacred den was about to be rearranged by a guy wielding a Chinese compass. Turns out that by facing the wall all my ideas were, well, hitting a wall, and that if I sat in the southeast part of the room facing the window, I would not only gain fame and fortune but also have a great view of my neighbor's dead potted palm collection.

Needless to say, my wife got to work on implementing Mr. Chang's other suggestions (moving the gas stove away from an outside door so it wasn't "burning our income" but was now below the fusebox and could set the entire building afire, moving the marital bed 30 centimeters to improve both our chances of getting rich and of falling out the window if we got up in the middle of the night), and started asking subtle questions about my contribution to domestic harmony ("When are you going to move your study around so you have a good idea for once in your life?"). So I realized there was no choice. I started pulling down shelves, moving stacks of old but important newspapers and unplugging thousands of cables, all the while cursing feng shui, my recently married friends and Arif Chang.

But then I realized Mr. Chang may be onto something. I'm still unclear whether he offered his "messy" comment in a professional or personal capacity, but he was right. The place was cluttered. Whether this has much to do with feng shui or not seems to be up for discussion. A Web site called TargetWoman says "the first rule of office feng shui is to get rid of clutter" and advises that reducing it will "create space for new opportunities and promote smooth flow of (qi)." Meihwa Lin, an Ontario-based feng shui consultant, explains that qi "can refer to you, your thoughts or your ideas, and it can be 'stuck' or disorganized as reflected by the condition of your desktop or space." That does sound a lot like me half an hour before deadline.

I was inspired. Anything that wasn't vital for my next column was out. Those big cardboard boxes stashed on the top shelves?I could feel them weighing down on my qi, or at the very least burying me alive one day, which may amount to the same thing. Laptops, routers, modems, mice I'd been keeping in a drawer for years on the off-chance I may need them again: gone. Several desk lamps that had at one point or another exploded in my face but that I'd kept for when I would return them in a fit of righteous consumer anger: gone.

Then I turned to cabling. Karen Rauch Carter, another feng shui expert, based in California, says that "a jumbled knot of wires can create frizzy, confusing energy around you." Come to think of it, I have been feeling a bit frizzy lately. So I ripped out all the cables and demanded they justify their continued presence. Many couldn't: specifically, 12 USB cables, five power cables, two power strips, two phone cables and one foot pedal (abortive musical career). All now gone. This wasn't easy, given that Mr. Chang had placed my desk in the middle of the room, far away from power outlets and phone sockets. To the rescue came wireless: Wi-Fi for the network, and a wireless USB hub from Belkin Inc. ($130) for printers, scanners and what-have-you. I can connect up to four USB devices to the hub, which isn't connected to the computer -- so there are no long, frizz-inducing cables between them.

Other qi-related tips: Keep your power strips off the floor so that you can get to them -- and also keep the dust off. Buy a label maker and label your cables and power adaptors. This makes it easier to turn off unneeded power and remove unneeded adaptors: I found four adaptors that were powering thin air, which I could find no feng shui-based reason for keeping.

Now some purists say all this isn't really feng shui. Stephen Skinner, Malaysia-based author of a dozen books on the subject, says that while clutter-clearing is useful psychologically, "traditional feng shui is more concerned with the big picture -- location of doors, directions etc." I've always pointed my desk at a wall, so Mr. Chang's suggestion was a big change. The thinking there, says Mr. Skinner, is that "it is better to have a wall behind you offering support rather than in front of you confronting you."

There's also the computer itself. Alicia Silva, a Seattle-based feng shui consultant, advises using screen savers as a means of psychological support. Ms. Silva has her clients "write their goal in a screen saver and look at it often." Others suggest setting up pictures of one of the five elements (water, wood, fire, earth and metal) as screen savers or desktop images; apparently we all need more of certain elements to boost our activities and resolve, and having even pictures of them around should help. I took some close up snaps of the water in a swimming pool, which is about as intimately acquainted as I am likely to get with the five elements. Until, of course, our kitchen catches fire.

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