Office Organizing Strategies to Prepare for the Holidays

It’s officially December! And with December comes holiday parties, family gatherings, shopping trips, and maybe even a trip or two. With an office full of people trying to manage work and their personal lives, it’s imperative that you take steps to ensure that work gets done during this holiday season. The key to making it all happen? Get your office organized with an action plan! Here are this NYC Professional Office Organizer’s strategies for coordinating schedules so that all essential work gets completed during the holidays.

Create a special team calendar. Before the holiday season gets into full swing, it’s best to organize a calendar of each staff member’s schedule during the month. Request all vacation plans and time off and add them to the calendar. Use this calendar to ensure that you have sufficient staff coverage daily to complete important tasks. Share the calendar with your staff so they can all take ownership in working together to get projects done.

Prioritize and delegate as a team. Take time to look at what projects and tasks need to be accomplished during the holidays. Delegate those tasks to colleagues who will be working during the holiday season. Also note the tasks that are less pressing and that could wait until after the holidays when everyone is back at work. This creates less stress in your office as the expectations of tasks to be completed will be more manageable.

Share the plan. Don’t let tasks fall through the cracks this season. Add your tasks and delegated projects to a project management system. This allows every person on your team to see what the rest of the team is working on, and it helps with accountability. As you create a holiday plan, share with your team through a Cloud sharing program like Google Drive so that everyone can reference it as needed.

Manage your day with an organized strategy. When you are working on your own projects plus handling the tasks for a coworker, it can be easy to miss important steps or to get overwhelmed. Keep it simple by prioritizing all of tasks based on importance and due date. Once you know the priorities, you can focus on those first and not feel as overwhelmed. Create a special flagging system on your to-do list to identify tasks due on a given day and color code tasks that are your colleague’s so that you can be sure you get those done.

The key during the holidays is not to work harder, but to work smarter. The objective is not to overload those who are taking on the extra tasks, but to organize the tasks and the schedule so that the members of your team are supporting each other as best they can. Keep it simple and make sure everything is written down so that your team can enjoy a stress-free season. For more office organizing tips and hands on strategies for your office through the holidays and beyond, reach out to this NYC Professional Office Organizer.