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Tips for Decluttering Your Workspace and Organising Your Office
October 10, 2024
If you have a messy workplace, your headspace might not be in good shape as well. They both correlate because the external environment can not stay independent and influences your internal environment.
Experts like Navy Seal Admiral William H. McRaven attributed their success to making their beds every day and having a clean environment around them. A cluttered space can correlate with less productivity, mental fog, anxiety and other heightened negative emotions. It doesn’t matter where you are working from, you need an organised workspace to stay focussed.
Let’s discuss some powerful office decluttering tips and help you tidy things up one by one. This will eventually help you concentrate on tasks better.
Why Decluttering Your Workspace is Essential for Productivity
If you have several unnecessary chits and papers around your desk, you will naturally have difficulty focusing on one task at a time. So many unnecessary stimuli and tasks can distract you and eventually lead you to the deadly clutches of procrastination.
A clean workspace with minimal distractions can help you fully concentrate on the task at hand and make you less prone to distractions.
Apart from all these, decluttering your workspace will also tremendously help you find the items you are looking for when you need them. The chances of things getting lost or misplaced also decrease significantly due to this basic habit.
In short, decluttering your office can help you stay organised, maximise your productivity, reduce time wastage, increase your efficiency and maintain a good quality of work. Since there are so many advantages to it, it’s worth giving it a shot.
Mental Health Benefits of an Organized Workspace
Not only does your productivity get improved, but did you know you can also significantly improve your mental health and escape several illnesses by organising your workspace?
A tidy workspace can ignite a sense of calm and composure within you. You will feel that you are in control of your environment instead of the other way around. A cluttered workspace can make you feel the exact opposite of that. Heightened anxiety, stress, tension and a constant feeling of overwhelm can devour you.
Psychologists have also found that a disorganised workspace can impact your ability to think clearly and rationally. This makes your ability to make bad decisions unlikely and speeds things up.
Just by taking care of your surroundings, you can fight all of that and move towards a more serene lifestyle.
Office Decluttering Tips
Whenever someone opens a shop, the first thing they do is broom it and allow the space for positivity to enter. The same logic goes behind organising your workspace. Let’s go through some practical office decluttering tips to get you started.
Encourage Employees to Maintain a Clutter-Free Desk
Be the leader of your office and encourage all the employees to maintain a clutter-free desk throughout the day. Make them understand how decluttering their workspace can help them boost their focus and productivity. (Which can eventually help them get promotions and increments)
Here are some quick declutter desk ideas to make them stay organised:
- Keep only essentials on the desk, like a laptop, a notebook and a pen holder if necessary.
- Use trays or organisers to keep paperwork and other office supplies.
- Don’t overburden your desks with personal items.
- Every evening, take 5–10 minutes to clear your desk space before you begin your next working session.
A daily or weekly organisation reminds the workers to declutter frequently and, therefore, helps them form habits that sustain order in the long run.
Implement Proper Storage Solutions
One of the challenges experienced in most workplaces is inadequate storage space, which means cluttered desks as most things are kept on them. To avoid this, make sure that your office provides enough shelves where employees can store their files, stationery and supplies.
Here are some suggestions:
- Ensure you have enough cabinets, shelves and drawers to store unnecessary files away. They need not always be in front of you.
- Supplies should be stored in open-top bins or stackable storage containers so as not to occupy much floor space.
- Try using built-in storage that hangs on the wall, and this will free up more space on the floor.
These storage solutions prevent the office from becoming cluttered and ensure that it remains that way.
Managing Paper Clutter
Papers and documents are the worst nightmare that any office can come across. To address this, try to reduce the use of paper wherever possible. There are applications that allow the storage of valuable documents online, such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Evernote. They help avoid making heaps of paperwork that is hard to search for.
For files that have to be kept in physical form, a system of arranging papers on the basis of importance or significance should be developed. This requires labelling folders and using various colours to easily identify the folders.
Check your papers often and discard unnecessary documents or papers that have been lying around for ages.
Creating Dedicated Zones for Different Tasks
Another good way of decluttering is organising the space and allocating definite areas for specific tasks. This way, you don’t have to worry when you have an office full of items that are properly organised.
- Have one area for your computer work.
- Allocate a space for discussions and exchanging ideas.
- Organise an area where the papers that are pending for filing or the office supplies can be stored.
Dividing space into zones is effective in terms of organisation since every corner of an office space must have its function. Not only does it improve the aesthetics of your working office, but it also increases productivity by aiding access to materials when needed.
Managing Office Supplies Efficiently
Staplers, paper clips, highlighters, etc., are among the many office supplies you must regularly encounter. Most of them need to be organized, to avoid a mess in your office. To prevent this, follow these office decluttering tips:
- Determine what supplies are necessary so that you do not have to order something that will pile up in storage. Ideally, keep supplies that can be sufficient for a few weeks.
- It is important to keep related supplies in containers that are marked or kept in draws to prevent chaos when searching for something.
- Create standard storage areas for items that are required regularly, including pens, staplers and paper, among others.
Sustainability in Decluttering
Another trend apparent in the organisation of offices is sustainability. When decluttering your office, consider ways to reduce waste and promote environmentally friendly practices:
- Shred and dispose of old documentation, paper works and packing materials.
- Donate furniture, equipment and stationery that you do not need but are still useful.
- Purchase environmentally friendly office supplies such as refillable pens, stationery made from recycled paper and eco-friendly storage boxes.
Eco-friendly decluttering has a positive impact on the environment as well as on people’s sense of responsibility within organisations.
Incorporating Tools for an Organised Office
There are multiple digital and physical tools that can help you maintain an organised workspace. Let’s go through them one by one:
- Management and organisation tools such as Trello or Asana allow you to track tasks without sticking Post-it notes on the monitor.
- Purchase read-only file management software so that all files can be stored and retrieved from the computers.
- Organisation tools such as label makers, desk organisers and cable management can come in handy when arranging the space around your desk.
The integration of these tools can facilitate the cleansing process and maintain tidiness and functionality in the workspace.
Set a Daily Cleaning Routine
It is important to ensure that your working environment is clean at all times. You will need to establish daily cleaning schedules so that the work environment does not get cluttered in the long run. Here’s a simple routine to follow:
- At the end of the working day, paperwork should be put away, trash should be taken out and all belongings should be placed back in their respective positions.
- Sanitize the environment by frequently cleaning the surfaces you touch, including the desk and the keyboard.
- Clean up papers and put things which were left on the desk back in their respective places in order to avoid clutter the next morning.
Organizing a workspace, which implies daily cleaning, is also highly effective in maintaining the health of all employees.
Conclusion
Decluttering your office is a major requirement for efficient organisation and reducing clutter. These office decluttering tips will help you design an environment that is free from clutter and increases productivity.
There are lots of ways to keep your working environment neat and as efficient as possible. An organised office environment increases efficiency and helps improve the workers' psychological and emotional state; therefore, it is worth the time and energy.
With these tips, you will be able to find ways to keep the free space in your work area as clutter-free as possible so that productivity improves and, with it, the morale of the employees.
Tell us in the comments below how you ensure your workspace remains decluttered and orderly.
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