You’ve got 15 minutes to spare and you want to make a difference in your office. Here are some quick tips to get you started with a 15 minute desk dash. Set the timer. Start the clock. Let’s go …
1. Focus on the top of your desk first. This is not the time to be tipping the contents of the drawers out. You can do that when you can see your desk top again.
2. Let’s think of your desk in two broad categories. “Paper Piles” and “Stuff”(Ha ha, you see … even an Organiser may once in a while categorise stuff as, well “stuff”)
3. Let’s deal with the Paper first …
- Grab 3 A4 blank pieces of paper and think of the acronym FAT.
- Mark one with the word FILE
- The next with the word ACTION
- And the third one with the word TOSS
- Now grab all the paper you can see on the top of your desk and quickly decide which paper lives in each of those three piles. At Get Organised we recommend moving from left to right, touching each paper once and deciding in about 30 seconds where that paper needs to live.
- You can also create a TO READ and an UNDECIDED.
Feeling better? Often we feel very overwhelmed by the amount of “work” on our desk. Dividing it up into these categories can bring a smile and a sense of relief when the action papers are separated out from the Reading and Filing.
If you still have time, you can always move on to the next quick dash …
4. What to do with the Paper Piles now …
(Save this step for your next 15 minute dash if things are taking longer than expected and move straight to number 5)
- Take your FILE pile and decide when you can carve out some time in your diary to add these papers to your existing Filing system. If you don’t have one, don’t panic … call one of our amazing team and we will come and make this happen for you. It’s what we love.
- Take your ACTION pile and write a quick MASTER checklist of everything that needs to be done.
- Take your TOSS pile and toss, recycle or shred.
- Keep your READING pile separate, so when you want to sip a cuppa and need some down time you can grab and go with your current reading.
- Keep the UNDECIDED papers in a box and set a 3 month reminder to check in on these papers then. If you haven’t searched for the papers in this box in this time … well, you know what to do with them now, don’t you?
5. Now let’s deal with the “Stuff”
- Again starting on the left, work through everything that is not paper.
- Touch each item once. Move from left to right. Ask yourself do I NEED this, do I USE this, do I LOVE this?
- If the answer is yes, by all means keep it; otherwise it’s time to sell, give away or throw away that item.
- Remember to group the like items together and label, label, label! This will help you find your stuff fast, when you really need to.
Well done! Let us know if this worked for you? Or how about posting a “before” and “after” picture on our Facebook page? Come on … we dare you! … Let the games begin …
Exciting, Wise, Inspiring and Downright Honest are words Kirstie Sprowson’s colleagues use to describe her. A Senior Member of the Get Organised Team and an experienced Productivity Consultant and Trainer, she enjoys inspiring others to greater productivity through her Team productivity workshop offerings and 1-2-1 consultations. Contact her for a complimentary productivity assessment, email ksprowson@getorganised.co or find her on Twitter as Kirstie Sprowson
At Get Organised we enjoy playing to our strengths. Thank you Harri Marshall for proof reading our posts.
Just looking for ways to quickly organize my desk and saw this! This is what I’m looking for!
Thanks!
Tiffany G. Richert, my goal is to live simply!
Perfect timing then and a great way to start the week. Enjoy!
Instead of putting receipts in a box why not mail them to scanr.co.za and they will digitise them all for you, thereby eliminating so much of that paper clutter. Visit them at http://www.scanr.co.za
Hmmm. Guessing you have a lot of desk space of you can leave three sorted but unprocessed piles laying around for the next time you have a cleanup! My work desk is 1000 mm x 500mm, and accommodates a laptop docking station and monitor and two stacked in trays (they can’t stack higher because of the configuration of the partition in front me).