The organization of your office says a lot about you. Imagine potential clients finding you in a littered and disorganized office; if you were about to close a business deal, you could lose it. A disorganized office gives an equally bad impression of the person using it.
As much as many offices have cleaners, they do just the basic cleaning of dusting and cleaning the floor. The rest of the organizing and putting everything in order is up to you. Once in a while, look through your paper work, discard what you don’t need or use and create room.
This will prevent you from wasting valuable time looking for files or documents and other important work tools . Find more tips of how to declutter office space.
Remove Everything and Keep Only What You Need
As much as some people might consider this extreme, it is the best way to get rid of what you don’t need. When you tell someone to put away what they don’t need, they might not know where to begin.
Everything they touch will seem very important to them, and will end up back in its position. But if you remove everything from your office, chances are, some things won’t return.
Also, once everything is out, you get the relaxing feeling of empty space and I bet you might want to keep. So you will only return a few to leave some more free space.
It’s then same thing with when you have a lot of applications on your laptop and a lot of shortcuts on your desktop. When you delete all these, you realize you were actually using very few of the apps.
Organize Your Items Based on Practicality
After returning only the things you need as emphasized above, the next step is to organize them according to how often you use them.
For instance, you know you’ll use your pen and notebook almost on a daily basis, so these should be put in the first drawer. Similarly, the things like the Human resources manual which you are likely to use once in 4 or more months could be kept furthest like in the last drawer.
The idea is to enable you get the things you frequently use easily without having to open all drawers and files and throw things around. Try this tip and you will realize it saves time and increases productivity.
Organize Your Desk
Your desk should have as few things as possible. Have about two cups to keep your pens and markers and have one or two note books or stick pads.
The rest of the files should be kept in drawers which are clearly labeled: Outgoing files, Incoming files, Very urgent and Future work. The closest drawer should contain urgent work or you could also keep this on the table so you don’t forget. Incoming files should be kept closest followed by outgoing and the rest can follow.
Organize Your Cables
Cables, wires and chargers are some of the things that disorganize a room. As much as some people choose to ignore them or just push them under the table, the problem comes when you get an electric issue and you take hours trying to identify the right cable.
The easiest way to organize cables is to label them for easy identification. There are also cable organizers out there that you might want to buy to make the process easy or you could use your creativity to create your own cable organizers from shoe boxes, paper holders, etc.
Digitize Your Documents
Have you realized most of the clutter in offices is due to paperwork? If you digitize your documents instead of keeping lots of hard copy documents, you create more space.
There are lots of paper work lying on our desks which we rarely use like business cards, meeting notes, stick notes and documents. So you could scan or type them to save them on your computer and just forward in case you want to share them.
Bottom Line
An organized office space is important and says a lot about us. If you regularly host people in your office, you want them to get a picture of an organized and tidy person. This can be achieved by decluttering your office and creating free space.
Reduce paper clutter by getting rid of paperwork that you don’t need and digitizing your documents. Also, organize your items with the ones you use daily closest and those you rarely use farthest.
