In most offices, the busier you are, the more cluttered and unproductive your working environment becomes. To boost efficiency, you must keep your office space organized. This might seem an easy task, but when you stay in the office every day you can become accustomed, and almost immune, to the clutter.
Why Should You Declutter?
Besides keeping your office neat and clean, what are the benefits of keeping your office free of clutter?
- Increase in Productivity-The lesser time you spend trying to find objects and required documents, the more time you save to focus on your work.
- Peace of Mind-Clutter not only affects your physical space but also your mental space. If your mind is concerned about the state of your office, you tend to become less focused and lose concentration easily. A cluttered office is symbolic of the worker’s state of mind.
- Brand Representation-If you entered your client’s office and found it disorganized, how would you feel? Keeping your office space clean gives a better representation.
Let’s examine some tips for decluttering your office space and, consequently, becoming more organized:
- Only Keep The Things You Need: Rather than trying to make decisions on what to keep and discard, sometimes it’s best to get rid of everything and then slowly add things as you require them. Take the analogy of a computer desktop. The more applications you’ve installed, the more shortcuts gather on your desktop background. But if you stop and look close enough you will see the difference between the most frequently used applications and the unused ones. You may manually make your background cleaner and less cluttered. The same principle applies to your office space. There are probably numerous items in your space that have been untouched for months yet they take up useful space and add nothing to productivity.
- Organize your Office based on Practicality: Once you have removed the clutter, the next step is to arrange the remaining items in your workspace based on how regularly you use them. Let’s look at our office table, a set of stationeries that are used frequently, and manuals that literally take up the entire spread. Place your frequently used items in your top drawer (like notebooks and electric chargers). Stash your pens and pencils in a cup nearby and store other equipment (like headphones, staples, rubber bands) in lower drawers.
- Sort by Keep, Recycle/Trash: If you want a quicker process of organizing your workspace, you may create three boxes: keep, recycle, discard (or place somewhere else). You will be able to find a box for everything. Even if you are sentimental and are unable to discard some items you will be able to find a place somewhere else for these items and reduce the clutter. Also consider which items you can recycle (papers and plastics) and which you can discard (empty bottles, leaflets, flyers).
- Create a System for Storing Office Items: Once you know how many items you need to store, you can opt for a filing cabinet to store all your folders. Hanging shelves can be used to organize binders, manuals, and other paperwork while drawer dividers can keep small office items separated and easy to locate. Every bit of office space counts. If the room is small and there is too much stuff you need to keep, use the walls to add extra storage capacity. Install vertical shelving and place the most used items on the lower shelves.
- Organize your cables: The number of cables in every office seems to grow infinitely from phone and laptop chargers to headphone dongles. Whether these cables are on top of your desk or below, most people seem to turn a blind eye to them. It is only when some problem develops in the electronic items that you realize the chaos caused in identifying and correcting the problem due to these cables entangled with each other. An excellent solution is to label each wire so that you know which wire leads were.
- Digitize Notes and Documents: Most of your clutter is probably in paper form: documents, business cards, meeting notes, etc. Instead of keeping them and running the risk of losing them, it’s better to digitize them by creating electronic copies, either by scanning them or typing them out.
The biggest change you can act out to stay clutter-free is to start afresh habit of cleanliness and organization. Whenever a new object is introduced in the office such as a piece of mail or a document, think about what you plan to do with it. Revisit the keep, trash, recycle or place elsewhere idea to find a place for the document to stay. Preventing clutter is the best way to keep your office clean and enhance productivity.
