Minimizing Clutter in Your Office

Minimizing Clutter in Your Office

1. Take control of surfaces first. In most cluttered offices, flat surfaces are magnets for clutter. If you don’t know what to do with a piece of paper when it comes into your office it gets laid aside, then buried, then picked up, re-looked at, and then put back on - you guessed it - a flat surface. The fix: attack one flat surface at a time. Sort through all your papers and put them into piles or boxes for action, reference, file, garbage and shred. Don’t spend a lot of time on the sort - just do it. **One hint on bills and other maybe-important things-if there is anything that is accessible online (credit card statements for instance... once reviewed) you probably don’t need to keep a paper copy. The IRS website lists items you need to keep for taxes, that is a good rule of thumb. It is less than you probably think.

2. Think vertically and furniture as storage. If your home office is small and you do not have a file cabinet, consider having stackable boxes or crates and shelves or hangers mounted to the wall. In the end of the day, you want to have a clean, simple office, and keep just the papers you need to have. If you can’t get rid of everything, then think about how to have storage where the papers can be basically hidden from everyday view.

3. Place a recycle bin close to your mailbox and get rid of everything you do not really want right away. When I started going through the stacks of paper in my office I kept coming on old ads, old bills and statements, and most of this never needed to be kept. Get rid of it before it becomes a problem.

4. Decide up front what your office is really for and make decisions based on this purpose. Your office is not the place to store extra towels, games, toys, or discarded clothes. Just dropping things in the office because you are tired of carrying them around is the road to clutter. The key here is to think not of straightening up or of organizing, but of purpose and minimizing. Getting really clear about what a space if for helps you get it and keep it the way that you really want. .