It was late 2018. November, specifically. I remember because the weather was already turning nasty, all that gray sky and cold wind, and my office life was just a slow-motion wreck. I was seriously thinking about quitting, but man, I needed the health insurance, you know? My boss, Dan—don’t even get me started on Dan—he was just breathing down my neck on this one Q4 report, and everything felt messy. Like everything. My desk was a total disaster, piles of useless paper everywhere, and my computer desktop looked like a digital landfill. I was just drowning in detail and totally unable to focus.
One morning, I was sitting there, wasting time instead of starting the actual report, and some dumb clickbait website popped up in my feed. “Virgo Career Tips for November!” or something equally ridiculous. Normally, I’d scroll right past that garbage. I am not one for star charts or any of that cosmic nonsense, but I was so desperate for a fresh start, I figured, what the heck, let’s try it. I clicked it, maybe just hoping for a laugh.
The article was pure fluff, total nonsense written by someone who had never held a real job, obviously. But tucked into all the vague predictions were three things that I thought, “Yeah, okay, I can actually force myself to do that.” They sounded like typical Virgo stuff, which I guess just means ‘neurotic planning’ in the real world.
My Stupid Little November 2018 Work Experiment
I actually wrote these down on a sticky note. I swear I still have that note stuck in a photo album somewhere. It was a stupid little list, but I committed myself to follow it for the entire month. I didn’t tell a single person, not even my wife.
- Rule 1: The Clean Slate Hour. Every single morning, and I mean every morning, before opening a single work file, I had to completely clear and organize my physical desk and my digital desktop. Every file, every folder, the whole drill.
- Rule 2: Spreadsheet Silence. No more meetings or talking through issues with Dan. If he asked for a status update, I wouldn’t chat about it. I’d just build the most perfect, multi-colored, ridiculously detailed spreadsheet possible and email it. Let the document do the talking.
- Rule 3: The Sixty-Minute Sanctuary. Take an exact, timed, 60-minute lunch break. Don’t work through it. Don’t read work emails. Just eat slow and stare at a wall if I had to, but the 60 minutes had to be mine.
The first day I tried Rule 1, I almost called in sick. I started with the physical desk. It took me a full two hours just to get that slab of wood cleared off. I found three dried-up pens, a handful of pennies, and a power bill from two years prior under a stack of old meeting notes. My computer desk was actually worse. Renaming files, deleting duplicates, making new folders for everything—it all felt completely pointless and like a huge waste of morning energy. But here is the thing that surprised me: when I finally did open the Q4 report file, I actually felt…lighter. I knew exactly where everything was. It was strange. I stuck with it. Twenty minutes, max, every morning after that, just scrubbing the workspace clean. It became a weird kind of meditation.
Then came the battle with Dan. He was a notorious talker. He liked to corner you by the water cooler and just keep talking, demanding updates while you were trying to work on something else. When the big budget review came up mid-month, I knew if I went into his office, I would lose the battle and get dragged into hours of pointless discussion. So, I skipped his meeting invite. Seriously, I just declined it with a one-line excuse about needing to finalize numbers.
Instead, I spent two days straight on an Excel file. I used conditional formatting until the spreadsheet looked like a psychedelic rainbow. Every single number was sourced, cross-referenced on seven different tabs, and highlighted with some insane color scheme. It was truly a masterpiece of completely pointless over-engineering, but it was perfect. I emailed it to Dan at 4:58 PM on a Tuesday. Usually, he would call me immediately, pissed off or demanding changes. This time? Nothing. The next day, he just walked past my desk, glanced down at me, and grunted, “Good work.” A grunt from Dan? I swear that is the highest compliment you can get at that company. The spreadsheet did the trick. Silence was a massive win.
Rule 3 was actually the hardest part. I always ate at my desk. Five minutes, scrolling through news, pretending I was busy. For Rule 3, I packed a real lunch—none of that sad desk food. I walked outside, even in the cold November drizzle, and I timed it with my phone. Sixty minutes on the dot. My coworkers thought I was completely nuts, checking my watch constantly, but I genuinely didn’t care. That enforced break, that mandated pause away from the screen, it broke up the afternoon dread like nothing else. I actually didn’t get that typical 3 PM crash anymore. It was wild.
Was it the stars? Was November 2018 some magical alignment for earth signs? Nah. That is a load of garbage, obviously. What I realized is that sometimes, you just need an excuse—even a stupid, astrological one—to force a bit of discipline and routine on yourself. I used that “Virgo tip” nonsense as a license to be meticulous, which is what I already am anyway, but was too burnt out and disorganized to use. It wasn’t about the career boost or some cosmic change; it was just about getting my head straight. It was about controlling the tiny, stupid things like my desk and my lunch, so the big things like Dan and the Q4 report didn’t feel so incredibly overwhelming.
That monthly experiment back then? It really stuck. The spreadsheet method is now my absolute go-to for any situation where I need passive-aggressive success. And the desk cleanup? It’s just a part of my morning now. It shuts up all the noise before I even start logging in. Turns out, the “easy work tips” weren’t about success at all. They were just about survival when everything else in the office felt like it was going completely sideways.
