How to organize your workspace Organize Your Workspace: The Different Categories of Organizing

"When you're talking about organizing your workspace you need to make a decision about what needs to be organized and there's five areas that you can look at," Laura Leist, president of the Mount Laurel, New Jersey-based National Association of Professional Organizers, explains. These five areas are paper, general stuff such as office supplies, your space and furniture layout, electronic information, and time management. Here are some tips for navigating each of these organizing categories:

Paper

The way you name your files can dramatically improve the organization of both your physical and your digital documents. Leist recommends that, "versioning control and consistent naming conventions are really key to document management and being able to easily retrieve files." These are just fancy ways of saying that a document's name should reflect which number draft it is and that the name should be consistent across versions. Having the date the document was created in the name can also be beneficial.

Stuff

Leist has observed that people will often rush out to buy more folders, containers, and staplers, before assessing what they already have. She recommends grouping all like items together and considering what role they play in your broader organization system before going out on a shopping run.

Electronic Documents

The paperless office is a neat freak's nirvana but even with an ever-expanding arsenal of electronic tools it's a rare office that has completely done away with dead trees. Which doesn't mean you can't make big strides in that direction. Adam Pash, the editor-in-chief of Lifehacker.com, a website that offers daily productivity tips and tricks, sees a paperless office in the near future. "Getting every aspect of your analog life into a digital format is the direction that a lot of people want to head and will continue heading," he says. But going digital is not a silver bullet. Pash notes that many people use their computer and physical desktops as a de facto to do list. As a result, all the things they need to remember accumulate and create disorder

Space

Small business owners "wear so many hats, they usually have pretty limited support staff, and they're idea factories," says Julie Morgensten, a productivity consultant and the author of Organizing from the Inside Out. "Your workspace has to be organized in a way that accommodates that." Morgenstern calls her system for organizing a workspace the kindergarten model: items and documents are organized by role into what she calls activity zones. In addition to helping you keep your things in order, it improves your time management skills as well because it gives you a better idea of whether you're neglecting one part of your business. For example, maybe you start to notice that you never go into the corner where your financial files are kept because you're always excitedly puttering away in the corner with your marketing files.

Time Management

One useful time management trick is distinguishing between events and ordinary to-do items. An event needs to take place at a specific time on a specific day, whereas another type of to-do, such as a follow-up call with a networking contact, can be taken care of on a more flexible schedule.

Fonte: Baseado em texto disponível em: http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/06/organize-yourworkspace. html. Acesso em: 13 fev. 2014.