Tips to Organise Your Workstation

Look around your workstation, identify the things that you haven't used in a while and get rid of them. Whether it is furniture, equipment, stationery, or accessories, if you haven't used them in months and can't think of using them soon, simply discard them. The same goes for plants and artificial decorations that are covered with dust and look shabby, which make your workstation look ugly.

Change Proximity

Collect every item at your workstation that isn't where it belongs and put it at its desired place. Position the items and equipment that you use frequently in your close proximity. Things that you rarely use can be stored or placed at a distant platform. A good way to do this is to establish work zones and mark your closets and drawers and place relevant items in them as much as possible.

Buy a simple and easy to use labeller for your workstation. Use it to label all your shelves, bins, baskets, and drawers. This will help you to keep things organised and put them in a place from where they can be fetched easily. Not only it will remind you where things will go but also it will help a new person to place and locate things easily at your workstation in your absence.

Create Folders

Assess all your documents to see if they can be stored digitally and if you really need to backup them. This will help to eliminate several unwanted files and folders. Create folders for different tasks to avoid handling messy papers. For instance, create a meeting folder to keep all items to be discussed at the same place. Similarly create a folder for items that are on hold or waiting for someone else's response.

Once you declutter your workstation, it's important to organise it also. Use containers, trays, and boxes to organise your desk. Put all your papers in a tray, stationery in a container and other things accordingly to streamline your desk. If you have frequent returning customers or clients, you can create inboxes for each of them with their names to keep things organised.

Organise Drawers

Label all your drawers and put things into them accordingly. Put things that are used together in the same drawer such as envelopes and stamps, sticky notes and pens, pencils and erasers etc. Put small items like pins, paper clips etc. in one drawer. Use a separate drawer for your personal items. Do not simply put anything and everything in your nearest drawer and clutter it.

Clear Piles of Paper

If there is plenty of paperwork involved in your daily work, you would often be surrounded by piles of paper, messing up your workstation. To organise your workstation, start sorting through the old piles one by one and put them in a suitable drawer or dump them if not required. Create a habit of not piling up papers and sort or dump them immediately after you have gone through them.

Organising your workstation doesn't take days but an unorganised workstation can cost you a lot of time to find the right item at the right time. So get started and organise your workstation now!