Office Decluttering Tricks – Part 1

A few weeks ago, LifeHacker.com posted a great article on decluttering your office space. We loved it so much, that we decided to re-post the article on our blog – and we’ve separated it into two parts! There are 10 tips total, and here are the first five:

From LifeHacker.com

1. Start from scratch

Chances are, you’ve tried to declutter before—but it just hasn’t worked out. If removing the clutter little by little doesn’t work, you may be better off starting from scratch and adding the stuff you actually need little by little. Take everything off your desk and out of your drawers, put them in a box, and go back to work. When you need an item, you can put it back on the desk. If there are things you don’t use after a few days…you probably don’t need them.

2. Re-Evaluate Your Belongings

Whether you’re starting from scratch or not, you need to evaluate what you actually need at your desk, and what can go. Clutter exists because our brain tricks us into thinking everything’s important. As you go through your stuff, ask yourself: does this item have a purpose? Is it redundant our outdated? Are you keeping it because you need it, or because you might need it? Did you even remember it was there? From the answers to those questions, you should have a good idea of what to do with it—even if you don’t like the answer.

3. Give Everything a “Flow”

Now that you’ve figured out what to keep, you need to decide where to keep it. Where you put things is just as important, since you want quick access to the things you use most often. Organize your desk drawers by importance—the stuff you use most often goes in the closest drawer, everything else goes in drawers further away. If you use a lot of paper, give your desk a left-to-right workflow—work comes in on the left, gets processed in the middle, and goes out on the right. That way, your desk is clear for whatever’s next. If your drawers start to look cluttered, an empty cereal box can make for a great impromptu organizer.

4. Tame Your Cables

Organizing the mess of cables under (and on top of) your desk is a never-ending battle, but you can take it to the next level with some simple tricks. Rain gutters make surprisingly great, cheap cable management tools, or you could buy something designed for managing cables like IKEA’s Signum line or Cablox. If all else fails, you can creatively display your cables when hiding them isn’t an option.

5. Find Your Trouble Spots

It can be hard to look at your workspace objectively and identify how cluttered it is. If you take a few pictures of your office, though, you might be surprised at what you find—from a different perspective, clutter will pop out at you in a way the real world doesn’t always allow. If you can’t find your clutter trouble spots, snap a few photos to find them.