How to Organise Your Workspace Offline and Online
Do you want to increase your productivity and achieve better results by only getting things in order? It’s possible! Cluttered tables, folders, as well as a chaotic environment, don’t help your productivity growth. They keep you from finding the right documents and acting more efficiently. So, you spend lots of effort searching for what you need instead of investing these resources into something really valuable.
Do you need proof? Here are the facts:
- The National Association of Professional Organizers states that employees spend on average 4.3 hours a week looking for necessary papers/documents, which causes much stress. So, paper clutter becomes a huge problem for most of us.
- The survey conducted by the company “Brother” revealed that almost half of respondents (41%) believe that a tidy and organised workspace is key to enhancing productivity.
- The same survey discovered that 33% (one in three) of office workers could be missing out on a promotion because they have a messy desk/environment.
- All in all, employees with well-organised workspaces are:
- 53% in control;
- 52% more productive;
- 48% happier.
So, you can clearly see that both offline and online workspaces should be tidy and clear. Let’s find out the simplest ways to reach this goal. After all, you will be able to assess the changes and witness the long-awaited increase in productivity.
Want to know how to organise your desk? Read this article!
1. Start with Old Docs
You might have dozens of drawers and cabinets, which have been filling with papers for years. Something may be so outdated that you won’t remember its purpose. Say ‘Goodbye’ to all that clutter!
Get those papers and notes out of drawers, put it in one pile, and reorganise everything.
2. How to Organise Your Desk
No matter whether you work in the office or at home. Get rid of everything you don’t use every day: papers, pens, notes, and all stuff you don’t use. You may throw it away or organise in paper folders so that you could find it somewhere in the locker once you need something. Anyway, all former paperwork won’t bother you again.
Don’t hesitate to throw out papers and things you don’t need anymore. This may be hard, as thoughts like “What if I need it tomorrow or next week/month/year” will pursue you… Still, if you haven’t been using your 50 pens and 100 pencils for a while, it’s unlikely you will need them later. Keep one example of every piece of office stuff and either give away or throw away the rest of them.
Also, keep an eye on desktop electronics. Equipment might have various cables that are taking free space from your working table. Get a special organiser to make your desktop clean from all these distractions.
3. Scan Docs and Go Paperless
Office work in the 21st century doesn’t require bulky equipment like printing or scanning machines. Everything can be kept in the cloud, and converting papers into digital documents is the task for an average iPhone. We have even covered this topic before, so check it out!
Scan every document and contract and let them live digitally. What’s more, digital filing systems give you more freedom in searching for the necessary file. What you would spend long hours on is now possible in a couple of seconds — the search bar is an excellent helper!
To make sure everything will always be in place, create a cloud backup, or copy everything to an external SSD or HDD.
Alternatively, you may go old school and create a color-coding system for a physical filing system. Still, we highly recommend switching online, as this option is more beneficial for the modern business that commonly implies global collaboration through the Internet.
4. Organise Your Digital Documents
To make your renewed filing system clear and easy to use, set the rules for organising it from the very beginning. We have an article on this topic, still, long story short, you should do the following things:
- Use a single place or even a disk for all documents. Be sure that everything will always be in place!
- Don’t mix working and personal files. Otherwise, searching for a specific contract among your vacation photos will be extremely difficult.
- Set folders in an intuitive hierarchy to quickly find the path to the documents you need.
- Give your files clear names. Almost 42% of employees complain they can’t quickly find files due to incorrect naming, so don’t be among them. ;)
- Start organising your files from the very creation or you will have to spend long days putting the existing chaos in order.
- Order files in a folder. Use numbers or symbols to highlight important ones and keep them at the top.
- Keep your folders clean. If you see that your folder has grown to more than a hundred items, group these items into sub-folders.
- Regularly back up important files.
5. Keep Your Laptop or Computer Clean
We’ve already discussed our offline desktops, but digital ones are no different! Having a laptop or computer desktop cluttered with tons of icons makes you feel puzzled even if you consider yourself a master of creative chaos. Try to move all these files to folders and see what a beautiful picture is there on your desktop!
For decluttering, use special directories on the hard drive, external drives, USB flash drives, and cloud services.
By the way, storing files in the cloud is a very useful habit since you can access them from anywhere on Earth. And you can travel light, without heavy suitcases, but only having a mobile device at hand.
6. Dedicate Time for Organising Documents
You need only 5–10 minutes to organise your weekly files while doing the same with 3-month documents will take you more than a couple of hours! You will need to recall the source and purpose of each of them, and a simple task can turn into an office nightmare.
So, set the time for getting everything back where it belongs every week.
Try these tips today and you’ll be pleasantly surprised how simple hacks can improve the overall productivity. Achieving better results is not so hard! And everything starts with the order and proper organisation.
