Clutter can pile on stress and anxiety in our daily lives. When the cluttered space is where we work, it can make doing any job impossible. We want to complete tasks and have paperwork on hand when it’s needed, and yet we’ll often find ourselves having to sift through massive piles of paperwork and scrap paper.
There’s no need to suffer through this kind of stress! Instead, here are some of the best ways to keep your office space under control.
Separate Work and Personal Items
When we work from home, it’s easy to mix our items and blur the lines between work and personal life. Unfortunately, that means our items quickly create clutter. For example, we might sit at our desk and fold laundry during a long meeting, or our desk may double as the place that we indulge in hobbies and crafts: and quickly, this space is covered in dryer sheets and crafting supplies.
Although it’s okay to keep this desk multi-functional, if you’re going to do other things at it, it’s a good idea to keep storage beside your desk so that they aren’t left on the surface while you’re working.
Organize Interior of Desk Flatware Drawer
This idea may seem strange, but flatware drawers are almost always perfectly organized because every item has its place. If your work requires specific pens or tools for projects, you can manage these with a desk organizer: or even pick up a flatware organizer at a dollar or discount store and use that. Having spots where everything goes makes it harder for items to pile up.
Set Five Minute Alarm After Work Ends
This may be an annoying habit to start since many of us want to leave our desks the moment we complete our work, but it’s a good habit to get into. Set the alarm on your phone to go off five minutes after your shift should end. In the time between your shift ends and the alarm going off, clean and work to get your deskspace back to working order. The moment you’re done, you can look at real estate in Toronto or cook dinner, but count these five minutes as work for yourself.
Be Digitally Organized As Well
Our work clutter often goes beyond piles of paperwork or bobbleheads covering our desks; it’s also digital clutter. When you complete work, do you let it save to your desktop in a pile of dozens upon dozens of other documents? If this sounds like you, it’s easy to start getting organized.
The best way to keep work in order is to start with a folder that’s titled whatever year it is. From here, inside of this folder, create another one named after the current month. Then, every month, create a new folder in this year, until another year starts. This will make it easier to keep your documents off of your desktop and will also make it simpler for you to retrieve something you completed on a certain date if you need to.