Office Organizing Tips for Your Desk Drawers
Which person are you – the one who can you easily pull open a drawer and find exactly what you are looking for, or the one who needs to wade through items in an attempt to find that pen or paper clip? Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us, but to maximize productivity at work, we need to reduce the clutter where we can. Office organizing is the difference between a productive work day and an overwhelming one. To rid yourself of that desk drawer clutter, here are this Professional Organizer in NYC’s top tips for keeping your desk drawers organized.
Declutter first. Before you do anything else, you must assess the items that are in your space. Start with the small office supplies. Throw out anything broken, out of ink, or that you no longer use (and recycle when you can!). Any items that don’t need to be in your immediate reach can be relocated to another spot in your office. Next, group like items together based on function and size. Organizing and sorting through the items that have collected will help you with the next step.
Give each drawer a job. Think of your drawers in order of importance. Store the most frequently used items in the drawer nearest your dominant hand so you can easily grab what you need and keep working. The larger desk drawers are perfect for storing action files and research files that you use regularly. Items that aren’t used in your day to day functions, such as archived files, should be stored elsewhere.
Identify storage solutions. Assigning a specific drawer to certain items isn’t enough. If you decide your top drawer is for office supplies and just dump everything back in, you still have the same cluttered mess on your hands. Instead, utilize storage containers, dividers, and trays to help keep items separate and organized. In an effort to keep the contents organized, label the bottom of the containers with the name of the item to be stored.
Maintenance. Maintenance. It’s inevitable that you will often be busy working on projects and maintaining your organizing systems may start to take a backseat. Schedule a few minutes at the end of each month to review and re-assess. Return items to where they belong and ensure that the solutions are still working for you. You might find that items stored in your bottom drawers are getting used more often, so this would be a great time to shift things around as needed.
As it’s easy to sweep your desk clean quickly by throwing everything into the drawers, the struggle is to ensure that this doesn’t become a regular occurrence. If you implement these office organizing tips in your daily work life, then you won’t ever find yourself hastily searching for a pen ever again. When you are ready for more hands on strategies and office organizing tips, reach out to your Professional Organizer in NYC.