As promised yesterday, we are going to share some interesting tips and tricks that will help you keep your working place in order and, in the result, boost your productivity. Let us begin with the most obvious and simplest ones, and get to those more specific later on.
First of all, you have to be aware of your habits. Our previous post can be of some help here, read it and try to establish your personality and approach towards the state in which you keep your office. The first habit that you should learn is absolutely essential, and yet many tend to pay it no mind. It concerns your health.
Ergonomics
If you read the Wikipedia article that we linked, you will find that this word has a lot of definitions but the one we shall focus on is called the ‘occupational health and safety.” The very first rule is to make sure that whatever you are working on is right ahead of you. If there’s a book that you have to take a look in every now and then, put it in such a place, that you won’t have to turn your head too much in order to read it. The screen should not be too close or too far from your eyes. You will find a lot of good tips in our article about being healthy in the office. For now, just remember – ergonomics is a must, the comfort, and the aesthetics are next.
Documents
There aren’t many who would claim that paperwork and segregation of documents are one of their favorite activities. It’s rather the opposite, we tend to hate it with all the contents of our hearts. But the fact is, it can become quite tolerable, especially if we establish the right system. Here are some clues:
Procedures
You have three ways to deal with the paperwork you receive:
- Delegate particular documents to the person that you know will take a better care of them. The one more experienced or knowledgeable that will surely deal with the task much faster. Remember, never use your authority to delegate the tasks that you are supposed to complete to your employees!
- Put them in the right binder. Have some of them labeled, for example, “requires immediate attention” or “can be done later” and sort your documents appropriately.
- Throw them away or put in the “practically unimportant but better to save” binder.
Always do the segregation of the documents concerning the task or project that you are currently working on the moment you receive them. Never postpone it, because it is very easy to lose a single sheet of paper that may later turn out to be essential for your work. As for the rest of the stuff that’s not needed immediately, it’s best to segregate it cyclically. Have a drawer for such documents and (depending on the number you receive per day) arrange them once a week, two, or a month.
System
You don’t need an overly complicated approach that is being advertised by experts in productivity and time management. It took them months or even years to develop and polish it. They had a lot of time to practice. You can, of course, borrow some ideas but it will be better if you start from something simple. Try one of these two systems:
- Keep everything close – Make sure that you won’t have to visit the attic in order to find something important. Also, when you take out some files that are necessary for your work out of the binder/drawer, after you use them but the task is not completed, put them back at their place but at the top of the other files. This way, you won’t have to look for them at all if it turns out you still need them to finish the project.
- Chronology – Always place your files in a chronological order and describe accordingly. Be it a binder or a file on your PC. You will be surprised how much easier it will be to find everything.
There are many other methods and you can, of course, try and adapt to new ones if you don’t feel like those you use are enough. Just remember one thing – if you don’t feel like your current system is sufficient and you decide to change it, do not try to segregate all your files once again according to the new system. Do it only with those files that you need at the given moment.
Organizer
Buy one! It’s good for you. Oh, you can also download one – the technology provides tools that do half of the work for us. The digital organizer may be your savior if you are suffering from organizational problems. Not only you can transfer most of the paper data to it, you can set reminders, alarms, and all sorts of other small facilities that will boost your productivity.
While we are at digital tools that boost our productivity, we believe that you may find TimeCamp quite interesting. It is a time tracking software that monitors your computer activities and offers a detailed analysis of your daily performance. It also has a lot of other interesting and helpful features.
Summing Up
If you keep your office neat and organized your productivity increases, and your will to work rises. As you can see, it is not that hard to have your working environment under total control. All you need is some positive habits and good old-fashioned routine. Try out our methods and let us know in the comments about the results!