How to Clean Off Your Desk
I’ve had a home office since January 2004 and I’m always looking for home office organization tips to deal with all the stuff I keep accumulating in my 110 square feet of space. My desk is by far the worst culprit. It catches nearly everything that comes in here.
Here are some pictures of my disaster area of an office:
This is my desk. As you can see, it’s completely covered with piles of stuff.
This is a table I had to bring in because I can’t fit my computer on my desk. If you look at the back upper right side of the picture, that is the top of two filing cabinets I use as a printer stand and paper holder. It is clean and organized, just the printer and the vertically stacked trays of paper to use with it. I have hope because at least one small space in all this mess is organized!
These are the tops of two of my four filing cabinets. Cluttered. I have no idea exactly what those files or stacks contain anymore.
And this is my bookshelf. It’s not too bad, but there isn’t room for it to get any worse. I don’t remember the last time I used most of what’s on it, except the procedures manuals.
Nancy Salem wrote a great review article in the Albuquerque Tribune of office organization tips from the book Order from Chaos: A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life by Liz Davenport.
Salem writes of Davenport’s system:
First you need an empty trash can and a spare chair or table to use for sorting things already on your desk. Your desk is covered, so you’ll have to have some free space to work on. Davenport advises to throw out anything you haven’t used in the last six months or don’t know exactly how it will be used in the next six months.
Davenport suggests a “cockpit” setup so all the things you use every day are right at your finger tips. She says all the things you use weekly should be within arm’s reach. Under no circumstances are you allowed to put these items where you would have to get out of your chair because you won’t come back for 20 minutes and you probably won’t have what you went to get. Items you use once a month can be in the office space. “It’s now legal to get up,” Davenport says. “But if you use something less than once a month, consider putting it someplace else. You want to create for yourself your own uninterruptible space.”
Next Davenport suggests a control system which has at least five vertically-stacked trays or files. I like vertical trays because they take up less of a foot-print on my precious desktop space. Most of us probably need more than 5 files or trays, but eight is the limit.
“The average businessperson has eight systems of keeping track of what they’re doing,” Davenport says. I find that insane. One system is hard enough to keep track of for me.
Davenport is an advocate of the Day-Timer and the FranklinCovey Day Planner systems. I have a little better way of keeping track of everything, my PDA.
Here’s a link to Nancy Salem’s article.
I’d love to hear what you think. Please post a comment.
Sherri
Leave a Reply