•  Dont deplete your chi. •  Practical steps to improve your workspace.

The next time you walk into an office for a meeting, pick your seat carefully. Try to sit in a location where no sharp corner is pointing at you -- the corner of the desk, a coffee table or a file cabinet.

Why? It keeps you out of cutting chi, which will make you feel more comfortable, help you think more clearly and, perhaps, even be more creative.

What's cutting chi? It's one of the principles of feng shui. Feng shui, its practitioners say, is an ancient Chinese science devoted to positioning buildings in the environment, and objects within buildings, to take advantage (or avoid the harmful effects) of the chi, a form of energy which flows among all things in the universe. You radiate your own chi, and it collects within you and your surroundings. (Feng shui is pronounced "fung shway" and means "wind and water" in Chinese: The images of wind moving chi and water collecting it dominate feng shui theory.)

Cutting chi, for example, is caused when a flow of chi energy passes a sharp corner, which causes it to eddy and swirl. If you're positioned within this swirl, it causes your personal chi to swirl as well, creating confusion, lowering your ability to think at your best.

If you are in a meeting in a conference room you can improve your performance through your choice of a seat. In his book Practical Feng Shui, Simon Brown suggests that sitting northwest facing southeast is beneficial for leadership, while the opposite position, sitting southeast and facing northwest promotes good communication.

Even if you can't control the positioning of your seat within the room, says Kirsten M. Lagatree, author of Feng Shui at Work, try to choose a seat as far into the room as possible and positioned where you can see the door. If you're in an interview with a person seated behind a desk, try to position your chair at an angle so you, too, can see the door. In any case, choose the chair that gives you the most command of the office.

If you think this is absolute hogwash, perhaps you should do your blood pressure a favor and skip the rest of this article. You have closed mind. If, on the other hand, you're open to the possibility that there are things in the universe your high school physics class didn't cover, and some of them just might give you an edge in your business dealings, read on. You're in increasingly good company -- like Esme Hecht and Alexis Watts.

Hecht and Watts run a custom jewelry company in Lake Katerine, New York. Their business took a dive for no discernable reason. So, they brought in a feng shui consultant, according to a Feb. 9, 2000 article in the New York Times, " Harmony and the Bottom Line." The consultant studied the building and recommended several changes, including landscaping around the plant to focus and collect chi, and an office move for Watts to the building's "wealth quadrant" on its south side. And, things changed. "When sales picked up, I thought it was a fluke, but it hasn't died down" Hecht told the Times. "We also have a much happier group of employees and are hiring more than the number we lost last year."

The consultant, Sophia Tang Shaul of Feng Shui Advisors, a San Francisco-area consulting company, stresses that feng shui is a science with a 2,000-year history incorporating astronomy, geography and environment, and energy fields and physics. Feng shui analysis relates four aspects -- environment, structure, occupants and time. A feng shui consultant like Shaul usually does considerable work with floorplans and compass readings to develop an analysis of a building and its effect on its inhabitants. The building must be well placed in its setting to protect the occupants from negative or stagnant chi, and from fast-flowing chi. The placement and use of rooms within the building, and furniture within the rooms, have their positive or negative effects on chi as well.

Feng shui is about balance and comfort, says Shaul. "If something is uncomfortable or something bothers you about your surroundings, then it's not good feng shui."

This common-sense aspect of feng shui is stressed also by Lagatree, who is the author of Feng Shui at Work: Arranging Your Work Space for Peak Performance and Maximum Profit, as well as a book on feng shui for the home, and coauthor of The Home Office Solution: How To Balance Your Professional and Personal Life While Working At Home.

Lagatree offers a quick list of practical steps to take to improve your workspace, whether it's an executive suite or a home office:

• Make sure you sit where you can see the door. Rearrange your desk if you can, and if you can't, put up a small mirror to see its reflection.
• Create balance. Feng shui uses a chart called the bagua that relates the points of the compass to sets of elements: the seasons, the major elements of fire, water, metal, soil, and tree, the colors of the spectrum and the animals of the Chinese zodiac. At the center of the bagua is the yin-yang symbol, which expresses the idea that elements are opposite, but they aren't opposed. The yin and the yang teach balance -- hard and soft elements, masculine and feminine. Your workspace should balance and blend. And you should balance your life as well: working to the point of burnout doesn't pay off, either.
• Get rid of clutter. One of the primary components of feng shui is how chi flows around you. The feng shui explanation is that clutter on your desktop, on tables and cabinets, inhibits the flow of chi. The practical aspect is that clutter is a series of postponed decisions. Each object, each piece of paper calls out for attention. Clutter distracts you. There is such a thing as creative clutter. But those people know who they are. The rest of us really should master the clutter.
• Choose comfort. Feng shui embraces ergonomics among other disciplines. If you are sitting at your computer all day, choose a very comfortable computer chair. Get a better keyboard that doesn't invite carpal tunnel syndrome, and an optical mouse that doesn't need a pad.

"The surprising thing about feng shui," Lagatree says, "is that it really helps people achieve their goals. In psychological terms, the reason some people achieve results from feng shui is that it forces them to think about their goals and to form the intention to achieve them. That puts them light years ahead of people who haven't. Then they use the bagua to address those goals. Let's say you're a consultant who isn't as well known as you'd like to be. The feng shui direction for that -- for fame, for reputation -- is the south. So you put an appropriate feng shui enhancement on the south wall of your workspace. The bagua relates the south to the season of summer, the color red, and the bird. You choose something from these concepts that is truly significant to you."

There's a practical core to feng shui, stresses Lagatree. "Psychology, ecology, philosophy ergonomics, and thoughtful design are at the base of feng shui principles. These principles have been used for thousands of years. They have stood the test of time because they work. I sympathize with people who have trouble taking it seriously. With feng shui practitioners proliferating as they have been lately, it's enough to give an ancient craft a bad name. A certain level of skepticism is healthy and useful. But just consider whether it makes sense to you, whether it looks likely. Just try it. What have you got to lose?"