Organizing Your Workplace [Infographic]

Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 3m 660 #organizing

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

How you keep your home says a lot about you and it carries to your office and desk work-space. While you can probably get away with it in your home, how you keep your workplace is another story. If you are unorganized and messy at the office, which is on clear display in the eyes of your co-workers and your bosses, it will probably clue them in on how you probably are with your work in general. If you have papers piled on your desk, a half-eaten sandwich that has been on your desk for a few days, and an empty water bottle that needs to be thrown in the recycling bin, you are basically stating your problems to everyone at your job. While they do not clearly state that you have problems, it shows that you are unorganized and uncaring, which may not present a clear accurate representation of you to your supervisor or boss.

Your desk is not your house or your apartment and your desk is not your car. You can leave those things a mess for months at a time and no one but you and those you live with will notice. While it is certainly best practice to keep your entire life organized, it can be understandable if you have things on your mind. However, if you plan to start getting organized, you will want to start with your desk at the office and then move to every other place of your life for organization. If you walk into your office or workplace tomorrow, and you notice that your desk is a mess, and it has been on your mind for a while, just take a half hour to clean it before you start work. You could do it on your lunch break as well, but being organized says a lot about who you are, how you work, and how you want to present yourself.

Remove any clutter and unnecessary items from your desk. Organize the papers inside your drawers. Get rid of any garbage inside those drawers. Once you remove all this clutter from your desk, you will begin to feel better about yourself, your work, and you may even want to spread your need for organization to every other area of your life. Your boss and co-workers will also see that you are a neat person, as presentation means everything in the workplace, and they are definitely judging you by the way you keep your desk.

This infographic further explains how to organize your work-space.

Click to open / Right-click for save options

Text-Friendly Version

Organizing Your Workplace

Don’t just organize your workspace so that you have a clean desk — organize it so you can be more productive.

Your Desk

Decide if everything in your office is actually necessary for daily tasks.

If you only “might need” an item, you should probably get rid of it to free up a lot more space.

“Might-need” objects include:

Unused paper weights

Loose cords

Old, unfilled papers

“Might-need” also tends to mean you don’t need it, so be honest with yourself.

Toss duplicates, keep the newest paperwork together, and organize the rest to prevent unnecessary shuffling to find what you need.

Choose where to place items according to how often you use them.

Choose where to place items according to how often you use them.

Frequently-used items belong in the top drawer on the side of your dominant hand.

Move your ”might need” items to lower drawers to reduce the abundance of clutter in your most used sections of the desk.

Control the cord clutter under your desk.

Feed all cords through a drilled hole in your desktop and plug them into a power-surge protector attached to the underside of the desk.

Cords can be kept in wire baskets and labeled with tags that identify which machine the cord belongs to.

Matthew Gates is a freelance web designer and currently runs Confessions of the Professions.

(