The best approach to maintaining cleanliness in the workplace

As studies have shown, because of the disorder, a person loses about an hour of his time every day - you must have heard this motivating horror story more than once. Not to mention the fact that chaos just gets on your nerves: everything seems to be at hand, but you constantly have to look for something. Keeping your workplace clean is really important, but not as simple as it sounds. The task seems to be a simple one, but even large companies whose management is obsessed with order and is ready to invest a lot of money failed the mission.

Goals

Before you begin the taming of the chaos that you created, answer your simple question: why? What do you want to achieve as a result?

The thought was perfectly formulated by Marie Kondo: "The purpose of cleaning is a return to a natural calm state."

We bring purity not for the sake of purity, but for the sake of inner harmony. At the workplace, a person should be calm and comfortable. What is needed for this?

• Clean information space.

Office staff usually work with information. The larger and more diverse the information flow, the more difficult it is for a person to complete the task assigned to him. Therefore, leaving all working documents in sight or hanging the monitor with many stickers with reminders is an unsuccessful tactic. The same applies to pop-up notifications from instant messengers or email.

• The absence of things that interfere with focus or restrict movement.

Firstly, to work you need a free working field. If, in order to sign an A4 format document, you have to squeeze into a lump and push your interfering objects with your elbow, then your workplace requires reorganization.

Secondly, the personal should not interfere with the worker. Frames with family photos and souvenirs brought from vacation do not allow you to fully concentrate - this is a fact. Even if we do not notice this, the brain still captures images and spends resources on their processing, because family and relaxation are concepts from the “Important” category.

Where to begin?

If you simply rearrange objects on your desktop, trying to group them effectively, you will definitely lose that notorious hour. You need to act differently.

The task is to completely free and clean the workplace. Your goals:

• purity of items;
• visual cleanliness;
• purity of the information field.

This means that first you need to remove everything from the table and from the nightstand. Put things in a large box, on a chair, next table.

Now take a damp cloth or special wipes and carefully wipe the monitor, keyboard, mouse, countertop, bedside table (inside and out).

Do not forget to put the trash basket next to it - everything that is unnecessary will certainly fly into it at the preparatory stage.

Putting everything you need into places

First of all, we return the monitor, keyboard and mouse to the table. Arrange them so that the screen should be at a distance of 45-50 cm from the eyes, and input devices should not make you hump.

And now it's time to stop and think. What else do you need for work?

• Stationery. If you have 10 ballpoint pens, leave one. A few pencils and a sharpener? Sharpen one pencil and put the sharpener in the drawer of the nightstand. Eraser? If you need it, then its place is next to the pencil. In a word, leave on the table all the stationery that you use every day, but in one copy. It can be scissors, correction fluid, color markers, paper clips.Put them in a glass or organizer, and the rest in a pencil case or box. We will deal with excess items later.
• Tools. Devices that take up a lot of space should not be stored on a table. Most likely, you do not use a puncher and seals every hour - they can be kept in a nightstand. But the small stapler doesn’t hurt - we leave it in the desktop organizer. The place for the calculator is determined taking into account the nature of labor: if it is used constantly, then it is worth keeping it on the desktop.
• Phone. Of course, the means of communication should be nearby. If the telephone is stationary, set it so that when lifting the handset, the cable does not touch other objects.
• Diary, glider. A magazine with a work plan is usually put in the left corner of the table - there it will not interfere, but it will always be at hand.
• Lamp. If you need a table lamp, then arrange it according to your characteristics (for right-handed people - on the left, for left-handed people - on the right). Do not cling to it with excess objects!

After that, it remains to deal with the storage of working materials - and putting things in order on the table can be considered completed.

Reorganization bedside tables

In an office bedside table there are usually three drawers. Each of them should be used to store a certain category of items.

The top drawer is what we use more often than once a week. It can be:

• printing
• hole puncher,
• scissors,
• pencil sharpener,
• stickers
• napkins for office equipment,
• paper clips.

Middle box - spare materials and what is rarely used:

• new office "in reserve" - ​​notebooks, stickers, paper, etc .;
• spare pens, pencils and markers that you removed from the table.

Manning the second drawer, you will have to deal with those items that did not find space on the table in the previous step:

1. All dried up pens and markers, “bits” of pencils, scribbled papers and dirty erasers are mercilessly thrown away - they definitely will no longer be useful.
2. Put usable office into a pencil case or a small box (this is important!) And send it to the middle box.

The bottom drawer is private:

• paper scarves;
• wet wipes;
• tea, coffee, sugar;
• mug;
• medicines;
• cosmetics.

A storm of indignation may break out over the mug: few people are ready to put up with its absence on the table. Well, if it does not bother you, leave it at hand, but do not forget to keep it clean.

Parsing paper

Cleaning up the papers is a slippery topic, because it’s hard to give general advice here. It all depends on how your work is arranged.

The main thing to remember when parsing papers: your goal is to streamline workflows.

Three main tips that will suit almost everyone:

• Buy an organizer to fit your needs. Documents in any case need to be divided into groups. For example, requiring immediate attention, non-urgent, reporting, archival and those that need to be sent somewhere.
• Store documents vertically, not in stacks. It is best to use multi-colored folders and place them in an organizer with vertical sections so that the “roots” are visible.
• Arrange a “buffer zone”. When organizing anything, it’s difficult to do without the Miscellaneous folder. Get yourself a box, basket or box where all the papers or objects that you have not figured out will fall. And make a rule: disassemble this box once a day or once a week.

Brand new computer

Do not forget that you have another desktop - on the monitor screen.

• Create several folders and distribute electronic documents in the same way as paper. Do not forget to make a “buffer” folder.
• Remove shortcuts from programs that you don’t use from the desktop.
• If a personal photo is used as wallpaper, you already know that this is a bad idea. Choose something neutral, without bright colors, strong contrast and a mixture of shapes.
• Close unnecessary tabs in the browser.

Don't overdo it

Having plunged into the process of putting things in order, do not forget that the fanatical approach in this matter has never justified itself.Companies in which management strictly monitors the “sterile” cleanliness of jobs and the absence of personal items on the tables at employees do not show impressive results. On the contrary, with the introduction of such orders, the productivity of office workers drops by about 15%.

Psychologists recommend finding a place in the workspace for objects that will act in a pacifying way. It can be a plant in a small pot, a table plate with a motivating inscription, some figurine that is not oversaturated with details, or a soft pillow on an office chair. The main thing is to choose a thing that will not attract your attention.

To the mess did not return

The main secret to confronting chaos in the workplace is to throw away the excess and not overgrow with new. We sometimes underestimate the enormous percentage of emotional resources that go into attachment to useless things.

An interesting study was conducted at a US university. In a group of people, everyone was handed a cup and asked for a while to hold it in their hands. Then they announced that the cups would become lots of the auction, in which the subjects will take part. The experiment showed: the longer a person held a cup in his hands, the greater the amount he was ready to pay for it. And this despite the fact that before that he did not need a cup.

Keeping order must be a conscious process. Analyze what you see in front of you and take away the things that create chaos. Leaving the office at the end of the day, take a look around the table and ask yourself the question: which of these will prevent me from concentrating tomorrow?