Review Your Office to Reduce the Clutter
What does your office look like?
If you visited my office a couple of weeks ago, you would have seen a heap of paperwork sat next to me on the office
floor and next to that my two draw filing cabinet, to the other side of me, surprisingly yet another stack of paperwork. All this paperwork is just waiting for me to find some time between projects, deadlines and last minute jobs to spend some time and actually organise and file it away properly. Then we move on to the black and white laser printer, ink jet scanner copier (printing is broken), fax machine, telephone which occupy their very own desk.
If your main wages depend on your productivity (and let’s face it most of ours does, including mine) it is just too easy to label these kind of menial tasks as ones that are non-essential. But don’t forget that if you let it get on top of you, and it all gets too much, your lack of organisation could conflict with your productivity.
A friend recently came over to give me a hand de-cluttering my office and made some really valuable discoveries which have helped me to reduce the clutter in my office.
Firstly she went through the paperwork I had in each of the piles and grouped it into two piles; one which was to be filed for later reference and one which was just junk like catalogues, reminders and circulars – the amount of useless paperwork I actually had was unbelievable. The filing cabinets are now being used on a regular basis and contain organised mission critical paperwork.
Secondly all of the devices I had, most of which were pretty old and clunky were causing me a lot of hassle, I reluctantly (at the time) decided to get rid of them all and added them to a website called free cycle, within a couple of days all items were collected by happy free cyclers who hopefully made good use of them. I now have an all singing and dancing networked copier, scanner, phone and most importantly fax machine and colour printer. I can’t believe I had spent this long with my previous setup which was so tedious; my new setup was surprisingly affordable also.
Thirdly She noticed that I like to make notes, but just end up losing them or writing on post it notes upon post it notes – I now use the Google Calendar function integrated with a tasks manager for ‘to do ‘ style organisation and meeting schedules. I missed a couple meetings in the past – now I have no excuses it even integrates with my blackberry phone!
Sometimes it takes someone to come in from outside the organisation to help you to see where you can do things better, reducing clutter is all about taking a step back and just thinking logically about the processes.
Do you have any experiences which you would like to share today? Have you gone clutter free?
Isaac writes for Office Magic are who are an office supplies company based in the UK, they have a wide range of office solutions to match any business needs – including photocopiers, printers, fax machines, scanners, computers and much more. If you are looking to get a new photocopier or check photocopier prices.
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Thank you for sharing your experience! I like the idea of storing all documents and notes in electronic form: in my laptop or iPhone, so everything I may need for work is always with me. I rarely work from home, usually I go to a cafe near my house or a coworking office when I have the most important tasks and I need to be as concentrated as possible.