Working Life > Workplace > Clean and Tidy

A Clean and Tidy Workplace

Definition, Explanation

There is a saying that goes: Who keeps things tidy is just too lazy for searching. But cleanliness and tidiness of the workplace serve one's career and improve the working atmosphere. Often, chaotic desks cause anger and conflicts among employees. The look of a workplace also makes bosses, colleagues and clients conclude something about its owner's whole way of working. Therefore, many companies care about the outer appearance of their offices and workplaces, and request employees to keep their desks in order and to keep things clean.

Cleanliness of the workplace includes, besides the office and its plants and technical spots, also the coffee- and tearoom. Are there dirty dishes with touch-dry food rests on all worktops, is the dish-washing machine overflowing with used dishes, and is there mouldy food in the fridge, or is everything just clean and tidy? The working climate depends greatly on such circumstances.

Cleanliness and tidiness of your workplace brings you energy, motivation, feelings of success, and helps you work effectively and feel comfortable.

Tips, Checklist

• Design your office interieur after your taste, though considering related ideas of your company. For an office in a consulting company, there are likely to be narrower constraints than there are for a desk in a manufacturing hall
• Organize your work, make working agendas, and divide larger projects into partial processes
• Plan your time
  • Consider, here, your circadian body rhythm. If you are a morning guy, you should take up the difficult subjects right in the early hours, and set back easy jobs to the 'low' of your mid-day / afternoon
  • Combine similar tasks
  • Finish single jobs after one another, and do not work on several at a time
  • Plan your working day already the night before, or before you start working
  • Assign priorities to your tasks and estimate the required time to do them
• Use your PC to save and retrieve documents. Not everything has to be printed out and paper-filed. Printed documents should be co-labelled with their filenames, so that you can find them again on your PC
• Make sure that nothing dispensable is standing or lying around, and that cables will not become dangerous as stumbling-causers
• Work with a jotter
• In which you can write it all down for later use: your ideas, tasks to do, contacts, phone numbers, and dates. You should have this jotter always on you. Note the dates along with your entries and leave a space at the side for comments. As soon as something has been done, strike it out. Instead of paper, you can also use your PC or Blackberry for those entries
• Processes that can be done quickly you should do right at first sight, and not put it in an inbox for later work
• For new mail, always work by the principle: what can I delete, delegate, work on immediately, and what belongs to a specific process and therefore into a special folder? A secretary can pre-process mail in such ways, for you
• Use separate piles of incoming, to-be-transmitted, and currently-worked-on tasks, in which you pile everything belonging to your processes: Everything new into the incoming pile, to be systematically worked down. What cannot be done now is put into the current-pile. By means of further piles, folders or files, you can define. The transmission pile, then, will contain the processes about which your part of the work is done and are to be filed or forwarded to others
• If, for the processing of a task, you are yet requiring something, put it on a list in your jotter
• After managing your mail, work on your current processes
• Work with reminders and with due dates. Write them down in your jotter, as well
• Keep it tidy by managing your desk consequently
  • Anything that you use more than once a day should be at your fingertips, like telephone, calendar, jotter, pen, and the current process to work on
  • Banish everything else into the desk, or in filing cupboards or hanging files.
  • For new processes, create new files
  • Files, magazine files and other repositories that you use frequently, should be put into your desk as possible
  • Label your files cleanly readable, electronic data with dates as well
  • Label material that is stored and belongs to finished processes with a date of disposal (internal or legal compulsory period of storage)
  • Use separating sheets, indices, colours, for making your files and folders quick to view and search
  • Cut your reservoirs in workplace (e.g. down to some envelopes and blank forms)
  • Divide your drawers so that things are kept separate, or use small storage containers – also labelled
• Divide large topics by subtopics, and archive those accordingly
• Make yourself clear rules for the when and how of disposal, and do not save things for the aspect of “I might well use it some time”. If you can easily obtain things again, e.g. on the web, then you do not need to store them
• Clear and sort out things regularly
• Tidy up your desk at the end of your work day, then the cleaning person will be able to clean properly

Articles

• Using Technology to Organize Your Life Without Paper; Dumb Little Man, November 24, 2009
• 5 Tips for Taming Cluter, Online and Off; Web Worker Daily, August 2, 2009

Last update: 01/09/2010