Don’t just clean your office, organise it

Earlier this month, there was a major clean-up operation at Taskmaster Towers. However, the cause of this disaster zone was entirely human-induced.

The old John Deere tractor almost came in handy during the disposal of the waste paper and other debris that had completely inundated some of the employee’s desks.

Members of the Pratt family were reportedly considering sending fruit baskets to the office in the aftermath – surely enough waste paper was cleared from the office to run a small recycling plant for a year.

Once the tide of excess paper was cleared, an office full of clean desktops was successfully salvaged.

That was less than two weeks ago, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at some people’s desks. While most of the desks remain clean, piles of paper have sprung up on others like weeds in a freshly mulched garden bed after a spring storm.

So why is it that some desks remain clean while others rapidly return to a state of inhospitable chaos? It’s because there’s a difference between simply tidying a desk and properly organising it.

To properly organise a workspace, you ensure that you have proper places to put the documents and other scraps of paper that cross your desk. This means setting up paper trays, filing cabinets, bookshelves, binder documents and the like. All your tax receipts go in one folder, sales catalogues in another.

On the other hand, you can make your desk look tidy by putting all your paper into one big pile without properly organising where things should go. This system works well until the first time you actually need to find something buried somewhere in that pile.

Not surprisingly, the staff who properly organised their desks have workspaces that remain clean and productive. The desks that were merely tidied now need a team of highly trained archaeologists to excavate any documents.

When was the last time you properly re-organised your desk, rather than merely tidying the mess? If it’s been a while, you have some organising to do!

Get it done – today!