National Clean Off Your Desk Day

Photo by VirtualCourtney on flickr.com

Every second Monday in January is "Clean Off Your Desk Day" and what a great way to start off the new year!  Here in Atlanta, we're buried under about five inches of snow today making this the perfect time for my local organizing clients to tackle their desks at homes.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Gather your supplies:  big trash bag or garbage can, a small box or container for the paper to be shredded, another box or laundry hamper for those items that need to be moved elsewhere in the house or office, hanging or manila file folders, depending on how you prefer to manage your files, and a label maker.

• Start with a bird's eye view of your office and quickly grab anything that isn't supposed to live on your desk or in your office.  Put these items into a "MOVE" hamper/box.

• Notice whether there are any other extraneous items on the top of your desk.  This includes framed photos, freebies from trade shows, excessive quantities of Post-It notes, etc.  These items need to be off your desk and placed elsewhere in your home or office.  The only thing on your desk top should be items and files that you use often.

• If you don't have a supply drawer, create a makeshift one using a drawer organizer insert that sits on top of your desk.  Or you can use the upturned top of a decorative organizing box to house commonly used office supplies, which is what I do.  The supplies I use less often live in the bottom drawer of a rolling file holder that sits next to my desk under my printer shelf. 

• Now combine all of your paper into one pile.

• Start with the top piece of paper and work your way down.  For each piece of paper on your desk, decide whether to Keep, Shred, Throw Away, or Delegate.  If you are keeping it, add it either to your FILE pile if it's reference material or to your ACTION pile if there is an action that you need to follow up and do related to that piece of paper.  Remember to put paper that can be delegated into the DELEGATE pile with the person's name who you're delegating to on the top of the page or on a Post-It note.  If the paper is home-related, feel free to delegate it to appropriate family members.

• After you get through your paper pile, if you have the energy and brainpower left to continue, file the paper in your FILE pile creating either manila or hanging files for your file cabinet or desktop holder.  If you don't have a file cabinet, a plastic file box with ridges for hanging files will suffice.   These are often on sale at your office supply store during tax season.

• THEN, if your brain has not yet exploded, decide how you want to handle your ACTION pile.  Prioritize the action items by how critical they are and when their deadlines hit.  Many people find a tickler/reminder system such as the 43 Files system that David Allen writes about in "Getting Things Done" which is the one that I prefer.

• Finally, deliver all of the items in your MOVE hamper to their appropriate rooms in the house or office.

If all of this is too much for you to take on in one day, go ahead and make this your "Clean Off Your Desk WEEK" and break it down into smaller steps.  Then enjoy the peace of mind that comes with a clean desk! 

Saving on School Supplies

There are a few stores that always make my eyes light up when I walk through them: the hardware store, The Container Store, Your DeKalb Farmers Market, and the office supply store. ESPECIALLY the office supply store. I'm pretty convinced that one of the main reasons I used to get so excited about school starting is because it meant that I'd get new pencils, notebooks, folders, erasers, calculators, etc. Wow, I'm giddy just remembering.

But before I get you all hopped up on an Office Depot high, let's stop, take a breath, and plan a course of action. Here are a few tips for saving time and money while accumulating this school year's necessary supplies.

• Take inventory of what you already have at home. Look in last year's school bags, your home office desk drawer and any other areas where extra school supplies may have landed. You know that junk drawer in the kitchen? It probably has plenty of pens and pencils to get you started. How do I know this? I've organized a LOT of junk drawers in my time. Plus, I'm a recovering pen hoarder.

• Check out your local paper's circulars before shopping. Many stores will match the sales prices of other stores so pick the one with the lowest prices on your bigger ticket items and then see if they'll match their competitors' prices on the smaller stuff.

• Bring your list. Unlike me, try and maintain some degree of self-control when purchasing office supplies. Buy what's on the school's list of the basics and get the heck out of the store. If you need extra support, take someone with you who is immune to the intoxicating smell of new notebook paper.

• Buy throughout the year as sales come up. But be careful not to buy more than you have room to store. Occasionally, go through your backup inventory so you don't end up with duplication and lots of supplies that weren't needed.

• Use stickers to jazz up less expensive but functional notebooks and folders. If the kids insist on upgrading to the flashier versions, have them pay the difference to help them learn valuable lessons about money.

• Consider ordering supplies on line. Schoolpak.com is a convenient and comprehensive site that caters to elementary through high school supplies. Teachers also swear by educationalwarehouse.com for learning tools, games, stickers, and even software.

With a little planning and self-control, you can save a little while sending your student back to school armed with the tools to take on any class or project.

Freshening Up the Home Office

I believe that it's a good idea to occasionally do something new in a space just to enliven its energy. Maybe paint a room a new color, add a new piece of furniture, or rearrange the furnishings already there.

Today I jazzed up my home office space by adding elfa shelving over my desk. The photo posted was taken just after I put everything back in place. Let's take a tour of the new workspace.

* On the very top shelf, I keep items that I sometimes reference but rarely need. These include colored hanging file folders, CDs from classes I've taken, and transcripts from a Success Circle Mastermind that I recently belonged to. Rather than give these items the valuable real estate that is reachable from my desk chair, I've put them up on the top shelf. I keep a stepladder close by to help me reach these items when necessary.

* On the next shelf down we have items that I use a little more often such as copy paper, writing tablets, thank you cards, manila folders, labels, and sheet protectors. These are easily reachable just by standing up from my desk chair.

* Further down and closer to the desk top is my reference material such as organizing and coaching books, notebooks from annual NAPO conferences, my binders from my Coach for Life training, and the notebook where I keep resource material for a book I'm planning to write.

* Moving down closer to the desk top, we're getting into pricier real estate. In order to live on the shelf right about the desk, an item has to be something that I use all the time. This is where I keep my dictionary and thesaurus, tissues, desk lamp, and a 3-tiered paper sorter.

Speaking of my 3-tiered paper sorter, I use the middle shelf of the paper sorter for papers that need to be filed. Once the pile reaches the top shelf of the paper sorter, that's my visual alert that it's time for me to do some personal filing. The other shelves on this paper sorter include ACTION at the top (high-priority projects I'm in the middle of right now) and PROJECTS on the bottom for things I plan on working on in the future.

* Finally, we have the desk top. I use a laptop computer for its portability. To keep it from overheating, I have it sitting on a plastic stand that was originally meant to be an under-cabinet glass holder. The pile of papers to the right of the computer is my ACTION pile for the day. On the far left corner of the desk is a tray that holds the little things one might have in desk drawer, only I don't have a desk drawer. So I have my sticky notes, stapler, paperclips, etc. in this tray. The tray was once the lid to the striped box on the very top shelf over the desk. I love to repurpose items!

Next to the office supply tray on a separate but flush shelf is a staggered file holder. In this, I keep those files and reference materials that I access ALL the time as my assessment forms, my Waiting For file, my Someday/Maybe file, and my current year's tax file.

So you see, I keep my desktop relatively open because it helps my creativity when I can spread my work out a bit and am not too distracted by visual clutter. Close by, I keep those items that I use quite often. And a little further away, I store supplies that I need but don't want junking up my work space.

And the best part is that it only took me about 30 mintues to install the elfa and restock the whole thing! I *heart* the ease of installation, flexibility, and durability of elfa shelving. My husband is also pretty excited to have inherited the Skandia hutch I was using before today. What do you use to store items in your home office?