If your entire house, office and work space are clean, tidy and with everything sorted and in its place, then you can ignore this article.
For the rest of us, here’s how to do it. The principles here can be applied to any room or space, but for the sake of illustration I will use a home office - mainly because I am typing this while sitting in a beautifully clean, tidy and sorted office - which didn’t always use to be that way.
And no doubt you can apply it to other life situations as well, such as sorting out your commitments, your finances, and so on and so forth. But I’ll leave all that up to your imagination.
When sorting a room the ideal is to sort it so you don’t have to spend an entire weekend on it but can do it over a longer period bit by bit without disrupting your work.
Here goes:
Step 1. Start a recurring task “Sort Office”.
Step 2. List every visible part of the office.
We start with the visible parts because it’s highly motivating to have an office that looks tidy and efficient, even if it hides a multitude of horrors behind the drawers and cupboard doors. If you start with the invisible parts, you are going to have to work in a place that look untidy and inefficient for quite a while yet.
As I was saying, list every visible part of the office. That means every piece of furniture, every window sill and other surface, and the floor. Divide the floor up into about six to eight portions, depending on the size of the room.
Number every item on the list, with the floor portions last.
Step 3. Take the first item on the list and sort its exterior thoroughly. Get it exactly the way you want it to look.
Step 4. Start a recurring task “Tidy Office”
This task is used to keep the parts that you have finished sorting in a sorted condition. Do not use it on parts that haven’t been sorted yet.
Step 5. Repeat Step 3 for each part of the office which you have listed.
Step 6. Once you have completed sorting the visible parts of your office, make another list of all the invisible parts. This will include all drawers, filing cabinets, cupboards, etc. Take each item on the list in turn and sort it thoroughly. The easiest way to do this is to tip all the contents onto the floor and sort them there.
There you have it. A complete sort of everything in your office with a recurring task “Tidy Office” to keep it that way.