Reducing Office Clutter
August 29th, 2009 | by FSW |Office clutter is the bane of my existence — and it should be for yours, too. A mess in the office means that things get misplaced or just downright lost, important documents gets crumpled and spilled on, etc.
So we probably agree that reducing office clutter is a good thing. But how to go about it?
Eliminating paperwork as much as possible is one way to go about it. Paperwork tends to stack up on people’s desks, particularly in inboxes and “to do” stacks. I think paperwork is probably the biggest cause of office clutter.
Luckily this is the digital age, and it’s not that difficult to switch to a fairly paperless office. No, you can probably never achieve perfect paperlessness, but you can at least reduce the amount of paperwork — and the amount of clutter — by digitizing the hard copies.
However, you won’t want just a standard little scanner for scanning all of your business documents. Network attached scanners that can scan pages at a relatively high speed are required — at least, they are if you want to get the job done this century.
You will also need to look into document management software solutions if you have a substantial number of documents to scan and keep track of. For example, my husband’s workplace has a shared drive where documents are accessed via a special system, so that employees can access the documents at any time and from any computer.
Reducing the amount of paperwork is only the first step in reducing office clutter. There are other things that can be done — for example, minimizing the number of things employees keep on their desks — but eliminating much of the paperwork is always the first step.
