Tips to organize your office

How many times have you tried to find a particular document in the pile of other documents and office supplies?

Careful planning and persistent hard work towards the goals could make your small business into an income-generating powerhouse.

Just by making it easy to find files and documents in the right place, workspace can be easily transformed from stressful to serene environment and ultimately boost productivity.

A few manageable tips to keep in mind while organizing your office are:

1. Declutter

This is the most commonplace tip that everyone would be familiar with. A thumb rule to follow would be that if you haven’t used a few things in the past year, chances are that they are redundant in your office. You can go through your desk drawers and file cabinets and check for any duplicates in the stack of papers, which are unused and unnecessary. The left over necessary items are easily accessible when you remove the excess and unwanted stuff from the office.

2. Filing cabinet

There’s always a personal preference over how you can file, be it alphabetically, or by a particular project name or by the name of clients etc. While this is for hard copies of paper filing, the same can also be implemented for electronic documents. Keeping one drawer for specific work tasks is an easier way to find necessary files, when needed. Printed documents can be put together in a file with a label over it which makes it easy to find and eventually you can also change the label when the documents inside are altered.

3. Organize your desktop

The entire look of your office changes when you just leave the extremely important items that are necessary for your work on the display or on the desktop. Items like computer and phone would be required on a daily basis, which can be left on the desktop and the office supplies like pencils and staplers could be kept in a drawer nearby. Deciding on the need for an item, place it away accordingly, like if you need a notepad regularly, you can place it in a nearby drawer that can be reached at an arm’s length.

4. Make it a ritual

Allocating about 10 to 15 minutes at the end of each working day on cleaning up your desk and organizing the files and documents would be helpful in the long run. You can keep up with the inflow of documents or files and arrange it in its proper place. Tidy office is always more welcoming on the next day instead of a chaotic office.