In many offices, the busier you are, you’ll find that often the more cluttered your workspace becomes. For you to have a more efficient and productive workspace, it’s important to try and keep your workspace clear and organised.
Although this seems like a simple task, it’s easy to let organisation slip and clutter build up. This can then lead to your workspace feeling chaotic and stressful, which in turn will affect your productivity levels and ability to focus. With that in mind, let's take a look at some ways you can declutter your workspace and improve your productivity and focus levels.
Reasons Why You Should Declutter Your Workspace
Other than keeping your workspace clean and tidy, there are some great benefits of keeping your office and workspace free of clutter.
Increased Productivity
By having an organised workspace, you are likely to spend less time trying to find specific documents or objects. It’s also been proven that when you work in a messy workspace, your productivity levels will be impacted too, often without you realising. If you have lots of paperwork and documents scattered around your office, look to move them onto a virtual storage space, such as Google Workspace or the Cloud.
Peace Of Mind
As mentioned, clutter doesn’t just affect your workspace, but it has a big impact on your mental workspace too. If you find yourself getting concerned or stressed about the messiness of your workspace, then you will find yourself getting easily distracted and lacking the concentration needed to get your work done. A workspace is often a reflection of someone’s mind, so how you’re feeling will be reflected in your workspace.
Tips For Decluttering and Organising Your Workspace
Only Keep Things You Need
Rather than making decisions on each thing that you have in your workspace, sometimes the better strategy is to get rid of everything and then add things back as and when you need them. Over a short space of time, you will soon pick up and add the things that you genuinely need within your workspace and what can be removed. No matter if you work in an office or from home, for a tech company or a commercial property agents, the same principle should apply. It’s not uncommon to have things within your workspace that you haven’t used or needed for months, but it’s not until you remove these items that you realise that you don’t truly need them.
Sort Out Your Cables
One thing which adds to the general untidy appearance of your workspace is visibly messy and untidy cables. We’re largely a digital world now and, with that, comes the requirement for many different types of cables and wires, from HDMI cables to phone and laptop chargers.
No matter if these run along the top of your desk or on the floor, it can often feel like a battle trying to get them under control, so most people tend to leave them. But, this lack of tidiness and organisation can add to your overall productivity levels. You can get many different cable tidying solutions, designed to suit your workspace and it will take just a few minutes to get sorted, but is something which will have a huge impact on your workspace.
See It From Someone Else’s Point Of View
If you can’t quite figure out where you’ve gone wrong in terms of organisation with your workspace, then a good thing to do is take a photo of your workspace and then look at it as if you are looking at it from someone else’s perspective. If you’ve ever seen someone else’s workspace and noticed clutter and mess that a coworker is unaware of, then you might not quite notice just how untidy your workspace is.
By taking a photo, you can get the same view as everyone else has of your space. Then, you can see exactly what type of environment you are working in and, depending on what it is your eyes are first drawn to, will know exactly where to start with decluttering and reorganising your workspace.
