One of the worst time thieves in all of the office world is lost files and other items which seem to always be going missing in huge piles on desks all over the country. While the time it takes to find each individual paper isn’t that long, maybe a couple of minutes, doing this several times a day will total almost two months in total at the end of the year. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how much more work you’d be able to do if you had an additional 2 months or more in every year. With those kind of numbers it’s hard to neglect the issue any longer – you must take action and get yourself tidy!.
The most important thing of all is to keep your working space simple and neat. Remember, your desk is for working on, not for keeping papers, pens or anything else. To demand your space back, start with cleaning out your drawers from any unwanted junk, then move the things from your desktop to the new space in your drawers. Of course don’t just throw things into your drawers as you will have to be able to find things easily later on. If you don’t have drawers, you can always get some low-cost plastic ones from any home office store, or get a set of office drawers to go under your desk.
Once you’ve got all your workspace supplies out of the way, you need to deal with your documents. Papers fall into 2 general classes, ongoing and archived. Ongoing papers are ones that you are working on now, either items that you need to take action on or items that you’re waiting for someone else to do something so you can move them forward. This group of documents is best dealt with by getting some stacking plastic trays which you can keep accessible on a corner of your desk space and means you can easily keep your documents in groups. The old papers are basically any documents that you don’t need to do anything with, but that you want or have to keep. This could be anything from a contract or signed agreement down to a newspaper clipping or Web page which you printed, read and want to retain for future use. The optimal way to store these papers is in some kind of file folders, such as plain or two pocket folders. Using 2 pocket folders and plain folders lets you produce as many classes as you need so that you can clean up your documents into whatever size groups you want to.
And finally, your file folders themselves need to be kept in some kind of organizer which will make it easy for you to find what you need. Depending on how many file folders you have and what the setup of your workspace is, you can either get a complete filing cabinet, or merely use shelves which you can attach to the walls. It’s important to weigh up what kind of file storage organization you’re going to use before you go out and purchase the files. For example, manila or hanging folders will usually work best in a filing cabinet, while two pocket folders will be the top answer for most shelves. Whatever you go with, it’s important to make sure that your filing system is within arm’s reach of your desk space. If you have to get up to put files away, you’re much less likely to really use the arrangement, which would defeat the whole purpose.