Today, everyone is under pressure with too much work and not enough time. Add on to that a great big dose of information overload and you turn into a pressure cooker. The heat rising as you cram yourself into a cramped workspace that just seems to keep getting smaller with every memo you have to find a place for, because of course, they are all priority. You can take control of your office and make a big difference with some small changes in work space.

Breathing Room

There is a to-do pile, and a done pile, and a pile for mail, and a stack of what might be trash, and an “I don’t know what to do with this” pile…We could go on but you get the picture. Walking into a cluttered office environment is like walking into a hot sauna or a smoky bar, it’s hard to breathe. You become overwhelmed almost instantly. This is definitely not a recipe for a productive work day.

To tackle office clutter, find a place for everything and put everything in its place. If there isn’t space for everything, then you must make it. Shelving will save a life. Ok, well perhaps, it won’t save a life but it could certainly save the day. For that matter it could save five days, or 365 days minus holidays and vacations.

Installing shelving units in empty wall space makes way for tidier surroundings. It makes documents, files, folders, reference manuals, and office equipment easily accessible and that saves time which saves money. It solves the problem of having so much to do that you don’t know where to begin. It lets a person take a deep breath.

Make Your Office Space User Friendly

Once you have installed shelving, (and don’t skimp on these) you can begin to make the office a place where you can be productive.

Don’t just use shelves for books. Get creative. To add a professional touch stack wood or leather document trays on a shelf that will hold documents you need to deal with, and things you haven’t looked at yet. Add one for office memos and one for the “what do I do with this” mail that somehow filters to your desk.

Try creating two shelving zones. The first, a computer work zone where you have shelving above or beside the desk in order to keep your desktop clutter free and allows you to easily maneuver around the area.

The second can be another part of the desk, or another area of the office that is not used for the computer. It is the area where you look over paperwork, sign documents, or return phone calls. This is where you use the shelves to store paper, files, manuals etc. Use wooden baskets to store things such as your cell phone, chargers, iPad cords, earphones, and other things of this nature. When you, or any employee walks into their workspace first thing in the morning and is faced with a clean work space, wonderful things can happen.