I’m going to ask you to picture two offices. Like really, read the first one close your eyes and imagine it and then do the same for the second. Ready?
Office 1: The most awesome office you’ve ever been at. EVER. The one you guiltily wish you could just live in and forget about the rest of the world.
…think about it. When you have, think about this one:
Office 2: The absolute worst office you’ve ever been in. It doesn’t exactly have to be dirty. But you wouldn’t want to go back there even if you had a surprise bonus waiting for you.
Chances are that the second one was super disorganized. Like I’m talking about the first place of messy offices. While the first was just the opposite. What happens is that most of us get so caught up in the day to day activities we have to do that we forget to do simply house cleaning in our physical and digital spaces. And there’s absolute truth to the fact that a clean workspace increases productivity. Here are 3 things you should do at the end of every week or even month to stay on top of personal housekeeping activities within the office.
Clean Up Your Physical Space
Clean up everything – your desk, drawers, bookshelves, shared spaces, everything. Do this and pay a little attention to how you feel when you walk into your office the next morning. Chances are you’ll feel fresh and geared up to target whatever tasks you have for the day.
The Challenge: If you share an office which so many of us do. To truly capitalize on the efficiency brought in by a clean workspace you’re going to have to get everyone’s buy in.
Disorganised Devices
I’d be willing to bet that 95% of my readers are guilty of this. If you’re not, comment below! But the majority of us don’t extract the true power of all our “smart devices”. Desktops aren’t optimised, there are numerous unused or outdated apps hogging memory, backlogged mailboxes are a topic of their own and I’m sure at least one-third of the files saved on memory are not needed.
The Challenge: With months if not years of digital stuff building up cleaning it all is just a nightmare. Have you ever tried to organize just you photos? It takes forever. My advice: start organizing everything that you’re working on now and hit the backlog of disorganized stuff once a week – one folder at a time.
Un-synced Accounts
LinkedIn syncs with Slideshare, Google goes across all digital devices and many websites. You can sign in with Facebook on many social accounts. I know a lot of people who aren’t syncing their accounts simply because they didn’t before. I seriously advise everyone to use the existing accounts for signing up where possible. It’s like taking a beehive of passwords and condensing them into one simple honey pot.
The Challenge: Collecting all the bees of course – or rather the accounts. If you’re like me you’ve signed up to so many services you can’t even remember them all. Really, the only thing you can do is to wait for the opportunity to sync accounts when you have to sign in.
There are always other things to do to stop yourself from being disorganised at the office such as deleting old to-do lists and removing old notes that you don’t need. It’s really is a constant effort to keep improving yourself (link to self improvement post). Subscribe to the blog to get more easy tips to implement for personal growth. If you have any tips or tricks for organization please do share them below!