Bluh, it's another Monday morning, but also a holiday week (for those of us in the U.S.). Half of your coworkers are probably on vacation, making the office seem like a ghost town. You'll have fewer distractions this week, so you should be able to get caught up in no time and then sit around twiddling your thumbs (or surfing the Internet)...or you can take a moment to assess your workspace!

Most of us don't get the luxury of selecting our physical workspace. We get stuck in nubby grey cubicles next to annoying coworkers whose cellphones go off constantly and you are stuck listening to their oh-so-clever ringtones. You might be a thousand yards away from the bathroom, stuck next to the copy machine and completely without even a tiny glimpse of the outdoors, but there are ways to make your office space suck not quite so much, which in the long run, will help you alleviate some of that dreadful "Oh noes, I have to go back to work tomorrow" feeling on Sunday night.

• Picture your bliss. You can't take inspiration from Peter Gibbons and remove your cubicle walls, but you can make your visual space more meaningful. Display a symbol of the you that exists outside of those four walls. For instance, clipped to the side of my desk, I have the pocket fold up map from The Bathhouse Spa, with notations on it for the plunge pools, the eucalyptus steam rooms and the rain wall. When I'm having a bad moment, it immediately reminds me of times when I've been absolutely 100 percent relaxed. And naked. But it's so tiny and out of the way that I'll bet my coworkers don't even notice it.
  
  
• Test the air. Ever heard of "sick building syndrome"? Yeah, I'm pretty sure my office has it. There's even something called Monday Morning Syndrome, which is when the office has been closed up all weekend, making the air super awful when folks come in, just thinking they have a case of the Mondays. What can you do about it, other than wearing a surgical mask to work and earning the nickname "Michael Jackson"? Ask the building manager when the air ducts were last cleaned and report any leaks in ceilings, floors or around windows--all are major contributors to the dreaded mold that exacerbates allergies and asthma and can make you sick as a dog. Also, where is the photocopier? Ideally, this should be in a separate room with external ventillation so that you're not breathing in all of those electrostatically-charged toner particles. If not, make some noise to someone who can do something about it (probably not your boss or her boss, but rather the office manager or maintenance guy). If your hands are tied, you can also invest in a small ionizer to plug in at your desk. The rest of your office may be choking on fumes, but you'll maintain a small bubble of fresh air.
  
  
• Take a walk. As busy as you are, you are guaranteed two 15-minute breaks every day. Push yourself away from the desk and take a little walk. If the weather is grand, take a quick walk around the building, or when it's gross outside, make good use of the cubicle labyrinth and meander through the aisles. Not only will it give you a brief mental break, but you'll sneak in a little fitness too.
  
  
• Cut the glare. Do your office lights make you feel like you're being interrogated with their intense glare? Request some glare-reducing sleeves or full-spectrum light bulbs from the office supply catalog and not only will you feel better at work, you won't squint as much, thereby reducing wrinkles! Bonus! While you're at it, get a glare-reducing screen protector for your monitor too.
  
  
• Avoid the "free" food. The office can really kill your diet, from the free food for the taking on file cabinets to the chips and cookies during meetings. Nothing's free, and if you load up on sugar and empty calories, you're not only going to hit a huge sugar slump around 2 p.m., but you're also filling up on empty junk food and denying yourself an opportunity to eat foods with vitamins and important nutrients. And we won't even speak of the excess sodium, fat and calories in that stuff. Start a healthy food revolution: offer to buy the snacks at the next meeting and bring in a bunch of cut fruit and veggies, dip and salted nuts. Circulate a petition requesting that the vending machine supplier devote 40 percent of the space in the machines to healthier fare. And help yourself resist the temptation of the receptionist's jelly bean jar by stowing a bunch of yummy sweet and salty snacks that won't make you regret coming to work.

• Turn up the heat. One of the biggest complaints about workplace dissatisfaction is the temperature. Either you're too warm or, more commonly, the air-conditioner is kept cold enough to store meat. You shouldn't have to wear cashmere in July, so bite the bullet and either requisition or just buy your own little space heater.
  
  
• Get a plant. Research shows that workers who have their own plant in their workspace are happier than folks who don't. Not only do they eat carbon dioxide and turn it into oxygen (thereby offsetting the sick building thing a little) but unlike people, our green little buddies love and flourish under those annoying 100w tube lights. Spider plants are the best air filters and practically impossible to kill, but that doesn't mean that you can't get a pretty orchid or bell jar full of succulents to jazz up your shelf.
  
  
• Eliminate clutter. Look at your desk right now. Even if you might not be as bad as the office headcase with last week's lunch moldering under a pile of papers, just how many highlighters do you really need on a daily basis? Just how often do you actually touch your stapler or scissors. Couldn't they really be stashed in your top drawer instead of cluttering up your workspace? One of the theories in Lean Six Sigma is that everything in your line of sight is a distraction, even if you aren't actively noticing it, so the stapler is all, "Hey, I'm hungry! Let me staple something!" and the scissors is like, "Imma cut a bitch!"...okay, maybe not, but the cup of jumbled pens that sits next to your monitor is going to take away some of your mental prowess as you try to wrangle Excel spreadsheets. Ditch your former desktop dwellers to a designated top drawer, so they're still in easy reach, and if your shelves have a million manuals and binders that you never open, stow them in the department library (or start a library with your binders). 
  
  
• Go hands-free. If you have your own phone that you don't share with anyone else, it makes sense to invest in a hands-free headset and save your neck and shoulders from trying to do the ghetto hunch so that you can multi-task during boring conference calls.
  
  
• Free your head. Pay attention to how you're sitting and holding your head while you're working. If your monitor is less than a 90 degree angle from your eyes, then you'll tend to tilt your head forward (or up) when you're working, causing neck strain and stress. If you type on a laptop, you may have to get a second monitor on a stand and then stow your laptop in a docking station. Bonus: you can split the screens and do the majority of your work on the top monitor for most stuff, but then pull other applications to your laptop's monitor to see both at once.