By Roz Jones
For April, we’re covering spring cleaning – getting your ducks in a row in your physical home, as well as clearing your mental space by practicing forgiveness. We hope you’ll be ready to charge into May with a new spring in your step!
It doesn’t matter if you’ve got an office job or if you work from home, keeping an organized desk and workspace is very important in order to work efficiently. It’s not always easy to pay attention to cleaning and organization when you’re worried about important deadlines along with the responsibilities of caring for your loved ones, which is why your space can quickly turn into a mess.
During spring cleaning time, take a day or two to concentrate on your workspace. You’ll thank yourself later when you’re able to find everything you need quickly and efficiently!
Consider some of the following cleaning tips for your workspace:
- File away your paperwork. Paperwork can get out of hand fast. Spend some time sorting through your paperwork. File important papers away, and shred any personal documents that you won’t need anymore.
- Clean your work surfaces. Since you’ll be able to finally see the bottom of your desk, you need to take advantage of the opportunity to clean the surfaces underneath the old clutter. Also take time to clean all of your desk items such as staplers, pens, and paper trays.
- Make your business contacts digital. Start a list of all your business contacts somewhere on your computer, such as your address book in your email. Keep track of their business name, photos, phone number, mailing address, and email addresses. This way you can toss out their old business cards that may be piling up on your desk.
- Deal with old reminder notes. If you have post-it notes all around the office, sift through them and throw out the ones that no longer apply. Reorganize them by priority, or make digital files to keep track of them. Post-its can get disorganized fast, so if you have something on a post-it that’s a long-term project, it’s better to keep your notes on your computer.
- Deal with digital clutter. Cleaning your workspace doesn’t apply only to your physical workspace. Is anything cluttering up your computer’s hard drive? How about your desktop? Go through your e-mail inbox and delete those you don’t need or file them away.
- Organize your supplies. Gather your work supplies into one area of your desk. Keep them in that space or a specific drawer. This will give them a permanent place so they’re not left out and scattered around your desk at all times.
- Clean the areas around the room. Vacuum the room around your desk and wash the windows, baseboards, and more. It’s probably not an area that you often think about, which is why it’s likely due for a cleaning.
- Make a future cleaning schedule. If spring cleaning for your workspace was a burden on you, it probably means that you let things get out of hand this year. You can prevent it from happening again by doing periodic cleaning of your workspace.
Once you have an organizational system in place, you can spend maybe 30 minutes per week keeping everything clean and organized.
It’s always a good idea to keep your workspace nice and clean. It helps you be more efficient, productive, and less stressed. Plus, a clean office environment is more inviting to you, your clients, and anyone you work with.
EXCITING NEWS!!
I am excited and thrilled to share with you my new adventure, “The Caregiver Café Podcast”. This podcast tackles and highlights the daily situations caregivers face with their aging loved ones. We also empower you to navigate the care and challenges of your loved one with relevant topics and through the voices of your peers and their life experiences.
We’re launching our first episode last week on April 4th, and you can learn all about it at this link.
Visit http://www.rozjonesent.com for more information issues that come up in the daily life of a caregiver and check out my upcoming book!
The Caregiver Cafe 