Your office gets clean and lean on the SPACE program.
Purchasing Agent
Establishing a relationship with a good office supply dealer has advantages. You can often arrange for delivery, discounts, and deferred billing. You may also be able to order special items more easily, and arrange to be notified of new merchandise shipments or unadvertised sales. Additionally, some dealers will host product demonstrations for their customers. Check your Yellow Pages or the sources at the end of this lesson.
Gathering Supplies
Experts agree: unless you are quite happy with an already efficient and well-organized office and filing system, you should start from scratch. Start with banker’s boxes. These practical storage boxes are usually sold in reasonably priced bundles of six or a dozen. The smaller size (15-inch) is more manageable for most people; but the larger (25-inch) boxes are often used for more formal record storage. You’ll use the cartons to set up new files and remove files for storage. The boxes can even be ordered with internal rails to accommodate hanging file folders, if you need this extra feature.
Use one of your boxes to gather up all the personal stuff in your office that’s not pulling its weight. If it’s sitting unnoticed (by you or any visitors), gathering dust, or in the way, move it or lose it. Have your light cleaning supplies available to swipe drawers and shelves clean as you move along; and make sure you have a large trashcan and recycling bin handy. Hopefully, you’ll be making visual progress by filing extraneous materials here.
You’ll also want a box of file folders (100 per box) or colored folders if you want them, hanging file folders (both the regular V- shaped and box-bottom styles), a pencil, and some Post-It notes to start setting up a revamped filing system.
Technology
Keeping up with technology can be a full-time job. If it’s not your job, know that technology provides tools, not organizing magic. Read up on specifics in popular computer magazines such as PC Magazine when you are ready to invest in new devices.
The Basics
Every office needs a few basic things:
- Work surface — The minimum for a full-time desktop is about 60 x 30 inches.
- Chair — Try out several. Get the very best you can afford. Look for height adjustment, smooth rolling, and swivel action to reach nearby files.
- Light — Let there be natural, overhead, and task lighting.
- File storage — Few homes need more than two well-pruned, deep drawers. Four are better. Sturdy is the operative word in file cabinets. Avoid cheaply made merchandise. If your budget is strained, you can find deals in used storage cabinets. Make sure you have or add hanging file frames in all drawers.
- Two drawer lateral file cabinets — Provide storage and surfaces for items to be stored within arm’s reach of your desk. Go vertical if you need more storage. Five drawer lateral files will yield the most in the same floor space.
- Trash and recycling bins — one each for everyone. Ample, accessible, and emptied every night is what you need.
- Telephone — For a home office, pick clarity and reliability. Get a second line and Yellow Pages listing for your business. Make sure it’s answered by a professional message at all times.
- Time-keeping tools — A clock and calendar are indispensable. How can you manage your time if you can’t see it slipping away?
- Computer and related technology devices as needed — Only you can determine what you need in computer hardware and software, fax, scanner, or handheld devices.
- General office supplies — You’ll need tape, glue, stapler, staple remover, scissors, paperclips, binder clips, pens, pencils, markers, pencil sharpener, file folders, etc.
- Stationery supplies and stamps — Paper, plain and fancy — for printing, taking notes, letterhead and envelopes, labels, and stamps.
The Right Place for You?
Organizing and analyzing bring up issues for many people. While answering questions about your workspace, you may fantasize about a different place. You may end up asking yourself if you’re in the right job. Find out more about career choices through private consultants, your local library, or local colleges and universities.
What Do You Do?
What you need to do in an office affects how your space might be set up. Types of office space come in infinite varieties. You may share a corporate cube, design architectural plans or artwork in a studio environment, or spend the majority of your time in a spacious executive high-rise. For you who spend little time in one place or have minimal needs, even a briefcase in an airport or a dining table cleared to make way for paying household bills can be an office.
If you work for someone else, you were probably assigned a workspace. Owning your own company or working from home may give you the power and flexibility to make decisions, but may not provide the funding necessary to furnish the office exactly as you would like.
If you don’t have a job, per se, what office functions do you do for yourself? What are your office needs? Are you looking for work? Do you volunteer your time and efforts for a good cause? Are you paying bills? Keeping up with lots of correspondence? Planning meals and food shopping? Do you manage any household employees? What are your needs in setting up a space for you to mind your business?
Most office situations demand compromise. That’s why close examination is necessary. To get organized, you must analyze, strategize, and attack your organizational challenges. When you are able to balance your needs and your space by being organized, your work will begin to flow more smoothly.
Achilles Heel
The term Achilles heel comes from Greek mythology. Achilles was considered the greatest of the Greek warriors. To make him immortal, Achilles’ mother dipped him into the potent River Styx. Unfortunately, she held him by one heel that didn’t get dipped. Achilles was defeated in the Trojan War when an arrow pierced his vulnerable heel — the hole in his immortal armor.
Analyze: What’s Working? What’s Not?
Look at what’s working in your office space. It doesn’t matter how long you spend in the place — nine to five every day or only once in a blue moon. There’s something great in your office that always works. C’mon, look closely. What’s yours?
On the other hand, what isn’t going so well? Even if you are pretty organized already, you might have an Achilles heel, or a hole in your cloak of office greatness. So, what in your office is not working for you? Remember this is your moment to nitpick and whine. Have at it. Is anything that you need to do your job missing? Is there something far away that should be closer? Is stuff gathering dust under your nose that could and should be moved to make way for the essentials?
Why Is Getting Organized Important to You?
This is your goal, your motivation, your driving force! Do you want to move up the corporate feeding chain? Make partner at your firm? Show the boss that you can work at home two days a week? Improve sales, and therefore, your income? Get home for dinner once in a while? Or just find all the bills that need to be paid by last week? What’s in this for you?
What are the problems standing in your way? In other words, what are the roadblocks and hurdles you are going to have to negotiate? You should notice the word negotiate. It means to carry on business, to settle, to conclude, to — and get this one — succeed in crossing! How can you set things up in your workspace world so that you can succeed?
Ergonomics
Ergonomics, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is the science of fitting the job to the worker. Although this means any job where man adapts to a machine environment, the common talk is of computer desks and offices.
Strategize: Setting Up Your Workspace
What activity centers need to be established in your office? Computer work? Telephone calls? Paperwork and files? Reference library? Communication between you and other people? Meetings? Design work? Is yours an intermittent office within your domestic space?
Lay Out Space to Your Best Advantage
If you’re a people manager, your office should specifically allow you to face and welcome visitors. If you’re a designer, you need ample light as well as plenty of surface space for working and storing supplies. If you’re at a computer all day long, you’ll need to pay special attention to proper ergonomics to avoid a stiff neck and repetitive stress injuries.
You want the things you use the most to be within an arm’s reach — almost literally at your fingertips. The letters U, L, J, and the triangle shape are all desirable formats for human workspaces.
In fact, empirical information suggests that people with strong right brains — they’re the creative folks among us — use the U shape almost unconsciously, spreading out their papers all around them in a semi-circle! If you’re interested in learning more about organizing for people with active right brains, you might enjoy reading Organizing for the Creative Person by Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Doris Cotter Lamping.
So often, people put their filing cabinet across the room or outside their office. File retrieval and replacement would flow much more quickly and easily if files were next to or behind you. Instead of a credenza, try placing low lateral files behind your desk. Try using a rolling file cart alongside or slipped under your desk for the files you use all the time or share with a co-worker. Remember, think kindergarten. Keep it simple: everything for one activity within easy reach.
Special Factors
Stephanie Winston, author of Getting Organized and The Organized Executive, suggests you utilize two special factors — practical and biological. Some tasks can only be done practically at certain times. The biological factor allows you to match your workload to your natural rhythm and energy levels. Reserve your most difficult work for your most energetic and alert times. Getting organized is about changing habits, which is stressful. Do these tasks during your peak performance hours.
Planning the Time
According to Julie Morgenstern’s estimates in Organizing from the Inside Out, organizing an office will take you from about seven or eight hours (for a mobile or cubicle office) to about 32 hours (for a home-based business office). Traditional offices (24 hours) and household information centers (16 hours) fall somewhere in the middle.
Trouble is, it’s hard to schedule large blocks of time like this. Even seven hours is a big block of time when you are trying to conduct business, run a household, have a life, and breathe in between — to say nothing of sleep.
You can use your planner to block large chunks of time or you can break up the job into smaller pieces. Morgenstern talks about using tools — her calendar, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and an assistant — to help her schedule the time and stick to the schedule.
You may not have an assistant, or may not be comfortable with a PDA, but you can set aside time. When can you set aside 16 hours for your household office? How about six hours on Saturday, and two hours on Sunday? Can you repeat that next weekend? Can you squeeze in an hour two nights this week? Do you have excess vacation time that you could use to take a day or an afternoon off? If no one else will be home, you could probably get a lot done. Or how about asking for help?
Making Time Work for You
According to Harold Taylor, author of Making Time Work for You and 11 other books on time-management topics, most of us procrastinate when the job in front of us is large. We postpone tasks that we perceive as unpleasant. We’re always looking to do the whole thing at once because that’s how we see it — cleaning out the garage, organizing the office, sorting through our closet. Instead, start somewhere. Do one thing. Let it lead to another and another. Let your success give you pride and courage to move forward.
A word of caution comes from Getting Organized author, Stephanie Winston. Don’t work too long at any one session of sorting through and setting up an office. You’ll start to get fuzzy in the head. Instead, be diligent and dedicated to keeping frequent, regular appointments with yourself. Use the same portion of every day to do what you promised yourself that you would do — get organized.
Time Waits for No One
“Everything will take longer than you think,” is one of many sayings attributed to Edward Murphy’s Laws. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” says Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his now-classic Parkinson’s Law. If you enjoy aphorisms like this, you might also enjoy Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time by Laurence J. Peter, author of The Peter Principle. Parkinson also says, “Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”
Sort and Purge
The 80/20 rule, a derivative of Pareto’s Principle, applies to your office — whether you’re a household manager or corporate executive. We use about 20 percent of what we have. The other 80 percent is no longer of value to us. Your aim is to sort 100 percent of your office, purge the unused 80 percent, and organize the useful 20 percent.
Sort by what makes sense in your office — people, data, things, subjects, and stories. Just be consistent. As you pick up items to be kept, mark your file keyword(s) in the upper right hand corner. Non-photo blue pencils are great for this task.
When attempting to unload that 80 percent that is crowding out you and your good stuff, ask:
- Is it old, outdated, and unused? If so, get rid of it.
- Is this a financial or tax record that must be kept? If not, get rid of it.
Definitely check with your accountant, attorney, or resident administrative specialist for retention schedules on important papers. Place anything that is necessary for permanent records in a safe storage area — labeled, of course.
Space Offenders
Focus on getting rid of things that have a negative effect on your ability to stay organized — supplies and papers that are old, outdated, or unused. Here’s a consolidated list of a dozen space offenders culled from Morgenstern’s “No-Brainer Toss Lists” for offices.
- Outdated vendor brochures, stationery, calendars, schedules
- Old and outdated magazines, books, articles, brochures, research materials
- Early drafts of creative writing, letters, proposals, reports
- Expired coupons, offers, invitations, warranties, insurance policies
- Unread magazines, newspapers, investment brochures, catalogs, recipes
- Junk mail and unwanted product solicitations
- Duplicate documents and superceded reports
- Outdated and/or messy sales books, supplies, samples, and presentation materials
- Old calendars and greeting cards unless they are very (very) special
- Instructions for items you no longer own
- Business cards from people you can’t remember
- Poor-quality or unflattering photos
Home Address
Once every item has one single, consistent home, you have to remember where it lives. You may find yourself returning to former locations through unconscious muscle memory. To make the transition and maintain your new level of organization, clearly label your containers. Use removable labels for storage where labels detract from the visual look of the space. It’s OK to rely on temporary labels until you learn all the new addresses.
Assign a Home and Containerize It
Time to put things away. File papers and supplies in their activity centers where they will be used. Think about client or active files in the desk drawer under your telephone and planning calendar.
Choose containers for function, but don’t ignore their form. Choose things that you like and that look good together. Organized Living authors Dawna Walter and Helen Chislett call this visual sympathy.
At Home
In any sort of home office, how everything flows visually from one space to another is important. But, it’s also the place you can most easily show your true colors. Walter and Chislett suggest, however, steering clear of black unless it specifically ties in with the rest of your space because it is a visual heavyweight.
Use shelving for more than books. Try using sturdy (and steady!) shelves as a room divider if you are carving out an office from living space. Or use low lateral files as a walk-up counter to your office. Create a designated place on the counter where family members can neatly leave paperwork for your action.
Home Away From Home
In a corporate cube, you’ll have built-in storage chosen by your purchasing agent and a space designer. There are a lot of extras, though, that can really stretch small space storage. You can add all sorts of trays, hooks, shelves, and hanging pockets to your walls. Your company managers may be willing to get these extras if they’re convinced that it will make you more productive.
You can even go vertical and add on below your desktop. Monitor risers and keyboard trays help meet office ergonomic guidelines for worker safety as well as providing more workspace. Custom executive desk units can include monitor storage below the desktop with a glass viewing panel for maximum clear desk space, and even allow for hidden storage of a complete computer system inside.
Helping Hands
Children often enjoy label making, and might be of great help to you in a home office or on a Saturday visit to your workplace. Their reward for good work might be far more economical than hiring out or adding to your assistant’s or your own workload. Also consider students looking to make a few extra dollars when you are looking for temporary office help.
Equalize: End of the Day to Year-End
The Organized Executive author Stephanie Winston uses a three-point desk check at the end of the workday:
- Are all your “to do” papers in your “to do” file?
- Are all your “to file” papers in your “to file” box?
- Move any papers remaining on your desk to their appropriate homes — trash, pending action, or file.
- Develop this good habit for yourself. You will actually feel less stress when you reduce visual clutter. When you return to your desk, it will be clear of debris, and you will be ready to face the challenges of a new day.
- As you use files, purge any papers you see that are out of date or no longer used. This practice of ongoing maintenance will help you keep files thinner and reduce the time it takes to find useful information. When you prepare and file monthly and quarterly reports, remove outdated versions from the files.
Filing Gets a Holiday
Tax season is a great time to perform annual maintenance on your files and office, says Taming the Paper Tiger at Work author Barbara Hemphill. You might even declare an official file maintenance day and allow your employees a casual dress day for the occasion. As last year’s records are pulled and compiled, start weeding. Remove the prior year’s records (or the oldest set in your cabinet), sending them to your long-term records storage. Go through all your files, removing unnecessary information, adjusting files, and labeling anything that requires a new or updated label. This is also a good time to assign the task of label making to an assistant.
Help Me! Resources
For ideas, pricing, and ordering information, check out this sampling of office furnishing, equipment, and supply dealers.
- 3M Corporation — office and ergonomics products
- Desk by Design — custom desks hide your computer
- Esselte — makers of many popular office products
- EZ Pocket — unique wall pocket files
- Fellowes — makers of banker’s boxes and more
- Haworth — modular offices and accessories
- Herman Miller — modular offices, ergonomic chairs
- Hewlett Packard — all-in-one fax, copier, scanner
- HON — office furniture, accessories, file cabinets
- Office Depot — national office supply dealer
- Office Max — national office supply dealer
- Pendaflex — online how-to-file guide
- Staples — national office supply dealer
- Steelcase — modular offices and accessories
- US Office Supply — national office supply dealer
http://www.usofficeproducts.com
- Ultimate Office Supply — harder-to-find desk organizers: 1-800-631-2233
In this lesson, we learned to strategize to come up with the best workspace according to your needs, what to put in it, and what to discard. In Lesson 5, we’ll learn more strategies for dealing with everybody’s nightmare: paper.
Assignment: Office Space
Visit at least three of the sites listed in the Resource section of Lesson 4. See if you come up with any good ideas for your office. Get out your calendar, personal planner, or PDA. Based on what you’ve read in the lessons so far, determine how long it will take you to organize your office. When will you have time to work on your office? Schedule the time with yourself. All of it. Mark your calendar with a finished by “goal” for your office.
Organizing from the Inside Out 