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We all know that a person’s work space says a lot about them, but did you also know that how you maintain your workspace can have a huge impact on your productivity. If you take a minute and think about it makes sense, if you have a well organized space with all the thing you need near by and very little clutter then whenever you are looking for something you can find it right away. On the other hand if you have a bunch of clutter in your workspace then its going to be a lot harder to find what you are looking for and therefore needing to find something is going to cause more of a brake in your concentration then it has to.

Beyond this very simple explanation of why having a well organized work space leads to higher productivity there are a lot of more subtle reasons that may not be so obvious. For example, maybe someone you know keeps a lot of stuff on their desk, some of it in process projects, some of it is mail that needs to be sorted, some of it is just stuff they meant to take care of but never got around to. Now this person needs to find something for an important project and they start sorting through their stuff, not only is it taking additional time to find what they need, but they also keep finding little things that need to take care of. If this person is prone to procrastination each one of these little unimportant tasks, like responding to a letter, or filing something, will serve as a great distraction from the real work they should be doing and they will spend time taking care of a dozen little less important things that they should be using to find what they need to finish the important project.

It is like I always said in high school; “if my room is clean it must mean I have a test or paper coming up that I don’t want to work on.” Just like a dirty room provides a great excuse to not study for a test, a dirty work area provides a great excuse not to work on a daunting project. By making sure that we always maintain a well organized workspace we can avoid these little distractions.

Some good tips for keeping your work area clean are:

1. Set aside time each day or every other day to handle the little things that come up like sorting mail, paying bills, etc. These are the types of things that can tend to linger in our inbox and provide great distractions from doing important things that we don’t want to do.
2. Keep well organized files. Good files can be a huge time saver when you need to reference older things and they also are a great way to keep from having to dig through things. If you need something and can just go straight to it in your files you won’t encounter all the little distractions that can through you off course.
3. Once every two weeks or once a month go through the stuff on your desk and get rid of everything that you haven’t used sense the last time you did it. We tend to keep things on our desk because we don’t know where else to put them, but if you can be judicious about only keeping the things you actually use on your desk you will find that you are much more productive in the long run.

I am sure that there are many more great tips and tricks you use to help keep your work area clean, but these are the ones that I have found help me. Let us know what you do to maintain your work area so we can continue to improve!

Technorati Tags: de-clutter, efficiency, managing your time, Time Management