Perhaps your house is already dressed to the nines – so why can’t you keep it together in your office? We all know that if your office is a mess, you’re wasting time looking for things while trying to get things done. So what can you do differently?

STATIONS/ZONES

Create stations/zones throughout your office. Your stations will be made up of categories within your office: mail station, printer station, file station, office supplies station, etc. Figure out what categories of items you have and focus on keeping those items together.

DESK DRAWER ORGANIZERS

Avoid having paper clips with your rubber bands, and push pins stabbing you when you try to grab the tape- ouch! Give everything a home by purchasing a desk drawer organizer. That way you won’t have an issue finding office supplies, you’ll know when you’re almost out of something and automatically keep things neat around your desk. We love these!

FILING SYSTEM

Once you’ve sorted, purged and categorized your paper, file those suckers! We like to use the most durable folders we can find and our favorite happen to be these from Staples. Sometimes it’s easier to file using a color-coded system. You might have green folders associated with your financial paperwork, red for medical, yellow for utilities…whatever makes most sense to you. What we like to do is create a label on the left with the large category (ie. Financial) and then the right side of the folder contains a label with the subcategory (ie. Financial- Credit Cards). Avoid labeling diagonally since our eyes naturally read from left to right, not at a diagonal.

ACTION STATION

Find a system that works best for you as your action station. Think horizontal or vertical. Have separate sections for incoming mail, Urgent items and To-Do items. Keep in mind that not everything is urgent (although sometimes it might feel that way).

CORRAL YOUR CORDS

Use these to corral your cords. It will help create a much cleaner look to have your cords organized and untangled and save you a lot of time when you’re looking from you iPhone charger.

DIGITAL ORGANIZING

I know we’ve said it before, but just take a moment to think about it. Imagine having an office with no paper at all! We’ve done it here at TLD and we love it! While it may seem daunting, start off slow with paperless billing to minimize paper clutter. Any items that you decide not to keep a paper copy of can easily be scanned and saved in some sort of cloud system. We most commonly use Dropbox for ourselves and for our clients.

LABELS, LABELS, LABELS!

Once things are put in the right area, labeling is a MUST! It’s like the icing on the cake, the cherry on the sundae, the cats meow…ya hear? Labeling helps keep things in order. It’s a placeholder for where items need to be returned once removed as well as indicating where to find things.

10 MINUTE ROUND UP

Maintaining your office space is not something that’s going to happen just because you organized it once. Make sure you are spending time before you leave each day to put things back in order so you can be ready to work the next day. Once your office is in order, you will find yourself working much more productively and believe me, if this is your professional office, your colleagues will take note too. You got this!