Organising your office for the New Year

It’s a new year. Time for those resolutions. – Did you say clean desk? Sometimes it can be difficult to see the full benefits of a tidy office, slaving over transforming your office to be a tidy and organised place can deter you from the process. However, if you take it to consideration the huge amount of time you waste overall, searching for things you ‘just put down’ or that you’ve misplaced on your disordered desk. To avoid the needless time wasting, you can follow some simple tips as you go into the New Year to boost efficiency in your workplace.

Firstly, de-clutter your personal workspace of things like scrap paper, and unnecessary documents. The needless scrap paper on your desk can slow you down when in the way of you finding things; also it gives you more space to carry one your own work. Documents left lying around can cause hassle too, when you need to locate them in a future there is nothing worth that searching through unrequired files that you’ve left on your desk, an abyss of mess. When finished using a document, take a minute just to file it back correctly – that way you can access it in the future with ease.

Alike your desk, your desktop on your computer can become a chaotic place too. With the amount of documents you create in an office, it can be easy just to save them with no real thought about how you will find them in the future. If you’ve done this, don’t worry – you just need to change that now. It can become a real issue when you cant find up your documents if you lose the hard copy, meaning you need to be able to locate your electronic copies. Go through your documents and create folders for specific groups of documents, making your files easy to navigate. Make sure you have specific folders for specific types of documents, this will save you the most hassle.

Emails. These can accumulate quickly in any business, with things like people enquiring, and jobs being set it can be easy to become over run with emails if they aren’t checked regularly. Make sure you keep on top of your emails and avoid having to go through and sort large numbers of emails at one – take them as they come.

Now that your office is more organised, the next step is to ensure no work is missed. Forgetting to do a task can be a pain, ensure this doesn’t happen by using reminders. You might be a physical learner – if so, use note pads or post-it notes to remind you what work is outstanding. On the other hand you may be a visual learner, you can use the Microsoft excel to your advantage in this case. In excel you can type each task in a separate cell, then colour code them to identify if they are completed or not. For completed work, fill the cell green and for unfinished work mark it red. This is a simple way to increase efficiency and focus in the work place that can benefit you by making sure you aren’t waiting for the next task to do.

Finally you need to get on top of the small and bitty tasks. These are often the most laborious of all office jobs like answers the phone, replying to emails, booking keeping, researching, general admin, booking meeting etc. When left for too long these tasks can pile up and take days to get on top of. If you find these sorts of jobs are becoming too time-consuming and taking you away from the work you need to get doing it might be work consider bring in some extra help in the form of a new employee or a virtual assistant like Smart PA. By bring in some extra help through a virtual pa or employee you can free up your time and other people time to get on with the work you need to do. When choosing between a virtual pa and a new employee it’s important to make the decision based on which would be of most benefit to you and your business needs and each have their pros and cons.