Increase productivity by de-cluttering your office

The office has changed. Open office spaces, shared workspaces between companies and virtual offices that offer temporary work and meeting spaces for small-to-medium businesses are increasing in number across cities everywhere. Traditional offices and office practices are having to learn new ways to keep up. Look online everywhere and you can find ways to remove office clutter and increase your productivity and many are ripe with great, simple ideas that boil down into little tasks, but there are even better ways that we’ve found in the way we at JUSTJUNK® work day to day. Some of the best ways to “declutter” your office are to limit the potential for clutter in the first place!

• Go paperless!

This may sound obvious but it works. With new, impressive digital technologies the necessity for paper products in an office lessens each day. Imagine all the potential needs for paper in a traditional office setting and look for the many digital options that exist:

• Memos? Either email or other new business communication management apps exist that can send out messages without the use of paper and delivers messages immediately without the wait time of paper delivery!
• Contracts or other documents that require signatures? Believe it or not digital apps exist that can allow clients to sign important documents digitally with the highest levels of security available at very cost effective rates. 
• Project/Business Plans? Not only does shared documentation exist for working collaboratively on projects, it’s free. Save the multitudes of paper on revisions with digital documents.

• Create shared spaces within the office. 

The best work is done with collaborative minds working together. Ensuring that spaces exist for personal work as well as collaborative work while eliminating the restrictions of assigned offices can make for more creative and productive development on projects. Making spaces shared helps limit the amount of clutter that can populate an office space. 

• Use your storage space inventively.

Shelving is important. No office is going to be completely devoid of potential clutter, but creating spaces specifically for storage with decluttering in mind will go a long way. Shelves that are wider and waist high, for example, are great, but they can easily become a platform for un-needed knick-knacks that can begin the process of cluttering. Higher shelves not only provide storage space but they don’t have a desk-like platform that could easily get cluttered. 

• Make a decluttering “schedule.”

Depending on your line of work there can be levels of unpredictability in your day-to-day. When these sorts of things happen you’ll find yourself needing maybe one or two additional items that you didn’t need the day before. Often times these little items aren’t sold one by one, so you’re stuck with 10, 20, or even 100 of these things you only need one of. Who knows? You think about it and maybe you can use that item later on for another of these “unpredictable” days. After six months, though, you haven’t used it. Maybe it’s time to think about getting rid of those items. This doesn’t mean just throwing it away, though. Donation services exist that you can get in touch with to donate items to those who may need them. Create a schedule and every four or six months have everyone in your office go through their items, and whatever they haven’t used in those last months is donated!

• Keep what you need close, find everything else a home.

In one of the above points we mentioned to use your storage space creatively. Within that, everything should have a “home”. Like a golf ball to it’s hole, some things in your office will have places where they will find a natural homeyness. Make sure everyone knows these homes for the collective office equipment. In the event that you need these items, make sure you only grab what you need at the time to limit clutter and make it easier to put these items back in their home. Unless you’re playing an office game, there’s no need for a free-for-all for staplers, pens, notepads or other items. Take what you need and make sure to keep the office equipment to its home. 

It’s not always about getting rid of office equipment; decluttering is a preventative measure for a better work flow and increased productivity. Without having to deal with office clutter and moving much of your traditional paperwork to digital platforms (that already exist!) your team can easily increase their productivity in no time at all! For all the times when office clutter becomes overwhelming, call JUSTJUNK® and then get started on your decluttering process!