If everything’s at your fingertips in your workspace, you're perfectly placed for success.

A well-planned, tidy office is not only a pleasure to look at and work in, it also makes you more efficient. The result? More time for parties to boost your income, or more downtime with family and friends. Try out these tips for size…

Basics first

In order to have an organised office, you need to have a home for everything in your workspace. Set yourself up with organisational essentials such as a pen cup, ring-binder files, file separators, plastic sleeves, stackable trays, self-adhesive labels, concertina files and storage boxes. Have two bins – one for recycling and one for waste.

Get space smart – your Tupperware diary, and the files and stationery you use regularly should be within arm’s reach as you sit at your desk. Items you use less often can be stored further away (in cabinets, for instance) and archived records such as last year’s old invoices and receipts could even be boxed, labelled and moved to the garage or another storage area.

Regroup once a day – use the last five or 10 minutes of your working day to read through tomorrow’s appointments in your diary, tidy your work area, file paperwork and write a to-do list. You'll be able to relax, knowing that everything is under control and you'll have clear goals to cross off tomorrow.

Paperwork

Use trays – an in tray, an out tray and file-it tray stack paperwork vertically in an accessible manner, so you don’t have papers all over your desk, or messy piles that mean you might miss something important.

Try the one-touch method – try to touch every letter or piece of paper only once. Read it, make a note of what you need to do, then file it or bin it.

Stationery systems help – place different sizes of envelopes, paper and Tupperware forms relating to recruiting, sales and reporting in a compartmented shelving system, so you can grab exactly what you need and see when supplies are running low.

Use it or lose it – perhaps you've got a collection of magazines with inspirational articles you enjoyed, or great business tips? Don't let clutter build up. If the information is still relevant, you might want to photocopy it to share with your team, or put it into a special ‘pick-me-up’ or ‘business ideas’ file.

Electronic
Now where is that Host email you received? Computer clutter can be as time-consuming as physical clutter!

Create folders and sub-folders – try to keep the number of folders on your desktop down by creating a clearly labelled folder with sub-divisions, e.g. 2010 sales, with monthly folders. Do the same on email – grouping mail according to an incentive, recruitment, team member, etc. You could even have a sub-folder for e-newsletters…

Create back-ups – once correspondence or data is six months to a year old, chances are you won’t need to refer to it often, so back up old data onto a disc or a flash drive, then delete the data off your system. (Don’t forget to do this with ‘sent’ emails too!) This frees up computer space, which should make your machine faster and it will be easier to find the documents and emails you do need.

Ban ‘miscellaneous’ folders – if you really can’t describe it, chances are you don’t need it!

Take out the trash – remember to empty the desktop recycle bin and the email program’s deleted items folder daily or weekly.