Organise Your Desk: Ten Smart Tips to Reduce Your Office Clutter
They say the messiest desks indicate creative geniuses whereas others argue a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind.
During a working day, your desk must suit you and help you be more efficient and more productive.
There is always room for improvement to re-organise and save space on your desk and we’ll give you 10 tricks that will show you the way:
1. Start from Scratch.
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Take everything off your desk and out of your drawers, put them in a box and then go back to work. When you need an item, you can put it back on the desk. If you find you don’t end up using any items from the box within the next few days, then you don’t need them.
2. Re-evaluate your belongings
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Don’t let your brain trick you into thinking everything is important. Ask yourself if every item has a purpose. Is it redundant, outdated or broken? Are you keeping it because you need it, or might need it? And did you even remember it was there. Answer those questions to re-evaluate your belongings.
3. Give your desk a flow
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Incorporate a little ‘feng shui’ if you will into your office space environment through presentation, bringing in some greenery (through flowers or a painting) and organising the layout by order of importance. The stuff you most often need goes in the closest drawer, while things you need not so often go furthest away. If you use plenty of paper, give your desk a left-to-right workflow.
4. Tame your cables
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Tangled cables are a never ending battle at home and at work. Take your organisation to the next level and invest in cable organisers that come in a variety of colours and styles to choose from. Or, there is always the option of hiding them as another form of cable management.
5. Find your trouble spots
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If you can’t find your cluttered spots or you think your too biased on yourself, take a few pictures of your office and look at it through your camera from a different perspective.
6. Enlarge your workplace
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If you’re multi-tasking the day away and you do have too much important stuff to put on the desk, consider enlarging your workspace or adding extra storage. Thinking vertically is a great way to increase storage space by adding shelves or using pin boards. Consider also raising your monitor and using space under your desk.
7. Create Hidden Storage
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If you’re unable to install traditional shelves, consider using a pegboard, which are incredibly popular way to hide cables, routers and other devices on the back of your desk.
8. Give everything a home
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Everything on your desk should have its own home, where it stays when your workplace is cleaned. If they don’t have a home, your desk will become a home for everything.
9. Reboot your office every evening, not just your computer.
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A sign of a messy desk isn’t a bad thing – it indicates you truly are working! The issue is keeping it messy and not maintaining cleanliness at the end of each day. When you shut down your computer for the evening, make it a note to give the desk a quick tidy too, so when you start the next morning it’s a fresh day.
10. Don’t go overboard.
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Being organised is a good thing; however don’t get too excessive with it, as you can waste as much time as you’re trying to save. Perfection can be an obstacle to productivity, so don’t sweat the small stuff.
Feature Image Source: ABC News
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