These days, paper mail, bills and invoices are redundant and often thrown straight into the waste or recycling. Clean lines and a clear desk are in, and stacks of paper on every surface are absolutely out. If your goal is to streamline your office and have a trendy, clean and simple desk, like a trestle desk from Fingerhut, you will need to go paperless – and it’s never been easier.
Before anything else, if you want a paperless, well-organized office, you must take action to stop receiving everything via paper or snail mail. Your banks, lenders, vendors, clients and colleagues should be set up to send and receive all communication online, and many companies have easy-access websites meant to quickly and painlessly allow you to go paperless. Once you’ve signed up for no- or low-paper communication with every possible source of paper waste, your time spent in filing and organizing will be drastically reduced!
Keep a paper shredder on hand for any paper ads, copies of information you already received online or other unwanted hard copies. You may choose instead to collect the paper waste and have it shredded by an outside vendor every so often, but this will lead to paper pileups in your otherwise clean office. Using your own shredder also saves money, and you can destroy unwanted documents immediately after reading them.
Make sure to keep hard copies of the most important information and legally required items like tax return or mortgage papers in magazine holders or slimline file holders, but for everything else, you can easily backup emails and account statements to an external hard drive and/ or a cloud server for future reference, keeping all of that data safe without giving it any real estate in your office. Experts recommend you also scan and save digital copies of those items in case of fire, flood or other unexpected damage to your hard copies. Search for stores like PCWorld’s for instance. These stores offer suggestions on different options for storing data the inexpensive and safe way. Take advantage of coupons and promo codes to help you save more from Mamma.
Finally, for optimal organization without a lot of hassle, make sure everything has a designated place in your office. You’ve heard the saying “a place for everything, and everything in its place” before, but many people make the mistake of underestimating the first half of that statement. If you do not have a place for, say, padded mailers in the office, you may end up haphazardly placing them here, there and everywhere, leading to unattractive and unhelpful clutter and confusion in the workplace. If, on the other hand, you do have a spot for each item you know your office needs to have in order to function, you won’t waste time looking for misplaced items or cleaning up “junk drawers.” Bins, baskets and boxes can make a big difference in the cleanliness of a room.
Now it is easier than ever to go paperless and have an organized office with a modern clean look. Try these tips to achieve your dream office and see just how neat and streamlined your room can become!
