Working from home can make maintaining a tidy workspace difficult and this can be bad for your productivity. However, there are a number of ways to declutter your workspace that, if done habitually, will make your life a lot easier and help you focus on what really matters.
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Being fully focused on the task at hand, saving yourself time, reducing stress and ultimately getting more done are just a few of the benefits of having a tidy workspace. And, if you’re a hoarder and tackling the mountain of discarded paper, stationary and unnecessary clutter seems impossible, making a habit of decluttering and maintaining a tidy workspace will make things easier. So let’s take a look at the five steps you can take to improve the way you get shit done.
1. Go nuclear
The first thing you need to do is take everything off of your desk. All of it. Your laptop, monitor, keyboard, pictures, coffee mugs, chargers, you name it… either set it aside if it’s necessary to keep, or throw it in the trash. The same goes for all of your orphaned pieces of paper lying all over the show.
Whatever you don’t need, chuck it. What you do still need, just add to a neat stack that you can sort through later. Once your desk is clear, take a cloth and wipe it down to get rid of the coffee stains and little crumbs from the rusk you had with your coffee this morning. Stand back and look at how refreshing that empty desk looks and get to work populating it.
2. Start small
Now that your desk is clear, think about the things you use that are fundamental to your work, such as your laptop and monitor. Find a place to put it where it can be the centrepiece of your desk and start building around it. If you have things like photographs or books or whatever else, place those things in an orderly fashion at the edge of your desk, where it’s out of the way.
Also take your stack of papers and create a filing system with labels to help you find the important information you need. Even if you just stack things alphabetically or by date in a drawer, it’s better than them getting lost. Find an appropriate place to put them and add your notebooks on top. Find something to hold your pens and other stationary and put it next to your documents.
3. Tidy your digital workspace
It’s all well and good for you to have a tidy workspace in the physical realm and it certainly makes life a lot easier, but that becomes null and void when your desktop looks like a dog’s breakfast.
Organise your desktop in a neat grid, get rid of unnecessary, random documents that are just occupying space, consolidate and put everything in order. Do the same with your downloads folder and make everything you need easy to access, saving you time that would otherwise would be spent trying to find everything among a cluster of unnecessary, unrelated files.
In the meantime, get rid of all the apps you don’t use that may be taking up space on your hard disk, and don’t run too many apps at once to make sure your machine performs to its full potential. Do the same with your email inbox to prevent losing track of the important conversations.
4. Consider background noise
If you’re working in a very noisy spot, sometimes there’s not much you can do about it, but there’s no doubt that noise is a terrible distraction. So clearing up your workspace also involves your other senses and what you hear is just as important as what you see.
Consider buying noise-cancelling headphones and putting on some music that helps you focus and muffles out any other background noises.
5. Consistency is key
Getting this done first time round may prove to be a challenge and will take a lot of effort. But once you’re done, it’s tremendously easy to restore the wonderful, tidy workspace you’ve created for yourself by doing a little bit of cleaning and/or re-arranging once or twice a week.
And it won’t cut into your working hours – in fact, it will reduce them with the cumulative time-savings that result from working in a tidy environment – so, really, there is no downside to making a habit of this, and it’s a lot easier to do than you think.
