If you live in Texas then you know that everything is bigger here including the mess an individual can accumulate throughout the course of a year in their office space. It is spring-cleaning season again and for most, that means throwing open the window blinds, or shades and doing some serious spring Houston office cleaning.
Here are some tips on doing away with the two most frustrating forms of clutter: the Paper Clutter and the Electronic & Digital Clutter:
The Paper Clutter
How often in your life have you been on the verge of going crazy because you can’t find a particular piece of paper? How much would it reduce your day-to-day stress if you didn’t have to look at stacks of unorganized stuff all week? Spring time is a great time of year to grab one pile at a time and get every piece of paper where it belongs.
Hints to Spring Clean Your Office:
You do not have to keep everything. How much of the stuff on your desk is just trash that gets shuffled continuously from place to place? Don’t look for reasons to keep stuff, look for opportunities to get rid of it.
If you don’t have a retention policy in place for paper clutter that has been compiling on your desk, take some time to decide what needs to be kept and what can be purged regularly. Be ruthless—paper versions of documents you have electronically, reports you will never read, notes you will never need—most of this can probably go.
You do not have to read everything you archive or collect. If there were something, tremendously valuable in that reading pile of yours… would you not have gotten to it by now? Instead, there it sits, not only taking up space but also discouraging you from reading the things that matter.
Have you considered just starting fresh? Don’t be afraid to send piles of reading material to the recycle bin if they aren’t worth your time and attention.
1. Electronic & Digital Clutter
Let’s say you’ve keep so many unnecessary computer files on your desktop and made so many multiple copies of others that your PC has become so messy and scattered that even the handy Search tool struggles to find what you need? Then you do it again. And again. The next thing you know; you’ve got a million icons cluttering up your screen.
Clutter-Defeating Tips
Putting an electronic filing system in place is a logical choice and it will be much easier to know where to save files as your receive or create new ones.
- Create your own personal filing system. You want all of your files to derive in a single master folder that is broken down into many subfolders. This can be your My Documents folder or any Main folder you like. This centralizes your information and makes creating back-ups easy.
- Rustle-up those pesky files. This is usually the intimidating part, especially if you have out of control folders full of misnamed or unknown files. If you are unable to handle this task all at once due to all of the accumulated file clutter, then do it a bit at a time. With just five to ten minutes of effort each and every other day, you’ll be amazed at how many files and folders you can have renamed and where they belong in no time. When you have a few minutes to spare, sort through a folder or get through a handful of desktop files. I assure you that each session will be easier than you think!
- Keep up with it. Once you have a clear desktop and no uncategorized files running around without homes, it’s just a matter of filing things correctly day by day and reminding yourself to constantly keep up with this task. It only takes a few seconds to label and file things appropriately as they come up.
By the time you’ve caught up with your paper and electronic/digital filing tasks, you’ll find that keeping up with it is a walk in the park…provided that you are committed to maintaining the effort and holding yourself accountable for all the clutter that you allow yourself to compile on the daily. Just remember, it is easier to put something in the right place in the first place than it is to play catch up and the next time it’s time for Spring cleaning again around the office you will have less stress to deal with and more time to have fun outside of the office!