The Perfect Office Space

As we have already discussed in a previous section, your immediate environment has a large influence on your productiveness, whether at home or in the office. Your workplace (especially your desk) should be modified to give you maximum focus, and the fewest number of distractions. Here are some guidelines to help you get started:

1. Your main working desk should be placed as far away as possible from the door. A window view is fine, but if your desk is facing or is too close to the door, chances are you will be looking out the door more frequently. Position your desk in such a way that you don’t have to look up at the door frequently. Like I always say, out of sight, out of mind.

2. A large desk can be a blessing or a curse. The desk’s horizontal space is almost always difficult to control, because you can just dump stuff on the top and forget about it. Random items dumped on the top have a tendency to become permanent fixtures. Don’t let this happen to your workspace. Clear your desk of unnecessary items, and make sure you have sufficient space for the stuff that you really need to put on your desk. If you need to put more stuff on your desk, consider elevated trays, so everything is within reach.
Your horizontal space is limited, but you can always use vertical spaces to expand the capacity of your desktop without limiting your actual elbow room.

3. Pictures, customized mugs, and other personal mementos are nice, and they are often placed on office desktops to make the space friendlier and homier. However, it still remains that too many personal mementos can clutter your desk. If you really want to keep your mugs and picture frames in the office, put them on a separate horizontal space. Keep one or two personal items on your desktop, and just switch items if you feel bored with the ones you already have. Don’t put all of them on your desk!

4. Let’s talk about your computer and the other gadgets you use to make your work easier in the office. Communication devices should generally be placed as close as possible to you, so you can reach for them easily. Printers and other bulkier items should be elevated or placed somewhere else, not on your desktop. You shouldn’t be fighting for space with large equipment. Adding a small table right beside your main desk might solve this problem. Or, you can just expand your table with the help of trays. Utilize the available horizontal space so your table will become that much clearer and more organized.

5. What about documents and other pieces of paper on your tablet? Let’s discuss how you can tame the paper monster:
a. If you find really old stuff, like bills and old memos that are no longer relevant to you because you have already read them, or you have already acted upon them before, just dump them in the bin. You don’t need to keep them, and I’m sure the information in those pieces of paper are stored electronically somewhere should you need them again. Receipts are a different issue though; if you find receipts that you may need later on, just put them in a folder and stow the folder somewhere safe. As for the rest of the unusable pieces of paper, throw them away as soon as possible, so they will no longer clutter your desk.
b. If you find a document that requires action, put them in the “active” or “in” tray. You can keep or throw out the document later, after you have taken the necessary action.
c. Some documents do not require immediate action, but do require some lengthy reading time. If you cannot review the document immediately, put it in a folder or tray marked “review” or “dynamic.” This way, you will be reminded that you need to look at the documents when you are available, so you can finally take action or get rid of the documents.
d. One other type of document is the one that needs to be archived, but no longer requires review or any type of action on the part of the recipient. Be wary of documents that seem to be valuable or essential, but really are not. Commercial catalogues and old memos that contain non-essential information should never be archived. Archive only official documents and other papers that contain information that cannot easily be replicated and may be useful later on.

6. As a final tip, make full use of your office scanner, because this can really help cut down the amount of paper you have stored in your office. If a piece of paper contains information that you might find useful sometime in the future, and you really want to keep it, just scan the document, save the image file on your computer, and throw away the physical copy. Every document that you scan and dispose helps keep your office free of unnecessary clutter.