Do you sometimes run late for meetings, forget where you had put your keys, misplace important files, documents or forget your appointments? Many people lose millions of hours looking for misplaced items. If this is a critical area of challenge you can follow these to organize your office efficiently in 5 easy steps once and for all.
Identify the categories of your items
The first way to organize your office is to simply identify and categorize the items kept at your workspace. Limit the number to about 7. You can have operational items (such as phone numbers, daily instructions and procedures), product samples, customer files, tax and legal documents, reading, assessment of tools or articles and future projects.
Sort the items within the office
After categorizing them, sort every piece of paper and every file within your office to piles that represent the major categories you identified. Start with all visible items then move to the items stored within file cabinets, drawers and the overhead bins. If you have a lot of materials to categorize, you would want to get a large box for each category so that the piles don’t get easily mixed up.
Make a sheet of the categories of items
Put the items in a certain order such as alphabetical order, date order or subject matter order. You can then make an outline or sheet of these sub-categories and the types of materials that are contained in each. This will serve as a future reference to where you have had your items stored.
Find a place to store each item
Consider the size of your items then find a place you can store each of them. How frequently you will need to access each item and which place in your office you will be using the categories will play a major role in categorizing the items. Later sketch an office workspace where you have placed each item.
Organize the items at the end of each day
You can choose to spend about 10 minutes at the end of each day putting everything away in order. This way, you will walk each morning to an inviting and organized workspace.