When you're busy, you'll find that your things tend to go all over the place because of how frenzied and frazzled you can get. Often, this means that your workspace becomes cluttered and messy, which can easily take a toll on your productivity.
Keeping your workspace clean, tidy and organized is the first step towards making sure you're working productively and efficiently, but it's not always easy to take that first step. As easy as it sounds, when you're sitting in that mess for long stretches of time, it may even stop feeling like clutter!
Let's consider some organization tips for decluttering your workspace, so that you can keep it neat and tidy, and avoid the trouble that comes with a messy workstation.
How to Declutter Your Workspace
1. Get Rid of The Extras
As tempting as it is to keep everything around you, all it really does is make your workspace cluttered because of how much space it takes. Even if you do manage to find an empty spot to keep things, it'll still be there, and as other items start to pile up it'll just add to the messiness.
The first step to clearing out your desk is to get rid of anything you don't need and only keep the very essentials at your desk. In fact, a better way to go about this is to put away everything, even the things you think you need, and only bring them back as you start needing them. This way, your desk will stay clean, and you'll be able to tell which items are the ones you need most frequently.
You can keep these items on your desk permanently, and store away everything that only comes in use every once in a while.
2. Organization For Practicality
Now that you've reduced the amount of things you keep at your desk, it's time to arrange them in a way that minimizes how much space they take up and how easily you can access the things you need frequently.
It's tempting to organize things based on aesthetics, such as arranging books with the largest at the bottom, and smallest at the top, but this is often not a very sustainable approach. The best way to organize your things is to see which ones you need most often and which ones you don't.
For example, you use your pen on a daily basis, but you probably don't need all your financial documents everyday. Keeping the pen locked away in a box, while the documents are in easy access would be a little counterproductive.
To make it easier to do your work efficiently, you should keep the things you use most often at the top. This means your stationery should ideally be in a cup or holder on top of the desk where you can get them easily, while chargers, notebooks or any other important items should be kept in the top drawers of your desk. You should store any extra supplies that you need often, but not as frequently in bottom drawers or in another storage space nearby.
Any items that you don't use as frequently should be kept further away.
3. Add Storage Spaces
Sometimes, your office may look cluttered because there are too many things visible, even if they are put away. For example, a stack of printing paper next to the printer may not necessarily be clutter to you, since they are where they're meant to be, but just the fact that they're visible may make them look like they're adding to the clutter.
Other times, you may simply not have enough storage space to keep all your things, and they may add to the clutter. The best way to get through this is to get more storage options. This could be an extra shelf or cabinet, or even just a box you can keep under your desk.
You may also want to consider how many of the items you want to store away really need to be stored away. Are they just taking up unnecessary space?
For example, if you can digitize documents and recycle the paper versions, this can easily clear up a lot of space on your shelves.
4. Take a Photo
Wait, what?
You're most likely wondering how this can help you organize your office, but there's a certain magic to how this works that you'd be surprised to find out. If you've ever stepped into a cluttered office, you probably noticed instantly that it's cluttered.
This is because when you step in from a fresh perspective, you'll immediately notice all the things where they shouldn't be, or if one part of the room has too many things in comparison to another. But when you're sitting at your desk and working with that clutter around you for long periods of time, it doesn't feel like clutter anymore.
One way to really see how cluttered your workspace is, is to take a photo of it from the doorway. This gives you the perspective of how it looks from a guest's perspective, and look at them closely to see what items are where they shouldn't be, which parts of the office look like they have too much stuff, and how you can clean it up.
This can also help if you take a photo of your workspace on the day you declutter, and then use it for comparison. If you compare your current space with the way it looked when it was clean, you're bound to see exactly how cluttered it's become since then!
5. Get a Monitor Mount
One excellent way to declutter your space is to just make more space. Usually, the most clutter is at your desk, when your things are strewn about all over, and you can't exactly make the table bigger. What you can do is try to reduce the amount of space your necessities take up.
Your computer monitor, for example: it's a necessity, and you can't remove it, but you have only so much horizontal space on your desk. What you do have though, is vertical space. By moving the monitor up, using a monitor mount, you can minimize how much of your desk space is taken up by the monitor, and thus make more space for you to work in.
When you have more space to work, your things don't end up getting stacked and stuffed in whatever closest place you find, which means you can reduce clutter.
FlexiSpot Single Monitor Mount
The FlexiSpot Single Monitor Mount is one of the best options for this.
This monitor mount comes with a fully adjustable arm that lets you rotate, extend, tilt or swivel the monitor with as much as a light touch, so you don't have to do anything special to get your screen to where you want it to be. All you have to do is push it in the right direction and it'll get there.
This monitor mount comes with a 360 degree rotation, which is useful when you have to work with things that look better with different orientations. It can also help with collaborative work, such as showing a colleague what you're working on for team input. It can also help with fixing the angle to be able to see the screen better depending on your sitting position.
The FlexiSpot Single Monitor Mount also comes with a cordless desktop option by incorporating a cable management system which makes it easier to keep your wires and cords under your control and make your workspace look less messy and cluttered. This way you get to work a lot more productively than you would otherwise.
This monitor mount is also very easy to install. You can use the C-clamp option, or the grommet option, depending on whichever works for you. All it takes is a few minutes to set up your monitor mount so you can start using it for work pretty much immediately.
The mount also has a fairly high loading capacity. It can hold up larger monitors with heavier weights, which helps in workspaces where larger monitors allow you to work productively and ergonomically. The screen size range is fairly wide, and so is the weight capacity.
The frame of the mount is made of aircraft-grade material, so you don't have to worry about your equipment falling over in the middle of your work and possibly destroying your desk with it.
Not only is this monitor mount perfect for freeing up your desk space, it also brings with it all of these benefits to make your work day more productive than it would be otherwise.
However, despite all of these tips, you should have a decluttering day every week just to make sure anything that slipped past your radar gets addressed, so your workspace can stay clean and tidy at all times.
