Cleaning your desk

Cleaning the desk at home seems to be one of the last things I get around to. For the 1.3m homeworkers and 3.7 million telecommuters in the UK, cleaning the desk also isn’t often a priority.

By merging home and work life, when we shut the door to our office, or leave our office space, there isn’t going to be an office cleaner whizz around after us. Our work space is our own responsibility, and we have to clean it ourselves.

When telecommuters, homeworkers or freelancers start their new working-from-home life, there is a sense of unparalleled freedom. Being able to nip to the kitchen for a cuppa without the boss or team leader throwing you dirty looks; being able to manage your own time like a grown-up. Glorious.

You sit down to work in your home office space like it’s your first day of school. New desk, new drawers, new filing cabinet, new office set. But a few weeks later the realization that you no longer have an office cleaner sinks in, and you look up from your desk and notice that there is dust across the monitor, several coffee cups lining the window sill, and piles of pieces of paper with no clear order.

It’s time to take control of your office space.

Having spent a few weeks or months working at home, you should have a good idea of how you work in this new office space. You may have noticed that your paper bin overflows very quickly, you may have noticed that you can rarely lay your hands on certain documents.

Consider your workday. What do you need? How often? What sort of system do you have at the moment?

Sort through everything on your desk and make piles: daily, weekly, monthly.

If you use something regularly, then keep it in an easily accessible place. Don’t put it in a drawer so that you have to reach for it several times a day and never put back. Give it a place on your desk, preferably on your dominant-hand’s side of the desk. I have my stapler, rule, pens and pencils on the right-side of my desk, for example.

By giving them a place on your desk you free up space in drawers for things that you use less regularly.

Then work through all the bits of paper lying around and make another three piles: *to hand, to file, to shred. *

If you have pieces of paper you refer to frequently during the day, why not laminate them and stick them on a pin-board, so they don’t take up space, don’t get lost and are easy to find.

Leave the papers for filing in their pile and come back to them later – you may have more to add to the pile as you continue your cleaning.

Keep a shredder under your desk, so that you can shred immediately – cutting away the need for big cleaning days. I still stick to my mum’s adage of touching tasks once only, if at all possible, which keeps my desk clean enough from week to week.

For your piles of filing, work out a colour-coded system for the areas of your life that you need to organize and clean those piles of paper away and hopefully out of your life forever!

With all of the stuff cleaned away from your desk, turn your focus to cleaning the desk itself and the drawers.

Take plastic drawers out and wash them with soapy water. Brush out wooden drawers and polish them thoroughly. Wipe shelves over with wood polish if wooden, and spray cleaner or a mix of fabric softener and water for laminate shelves to keep dust down and give your office space a lovely aroma.

Clean your desk down from top to bottom, not forgetting the legs and inner parts of the desk.

When your desk, shelves and drawers are all cleaned, lay your desk out how it will best work for you. Think carefully about where you put things to optimize their usefulness according to how regularly they’re used.

Lastly, vacuum your office space and put a couple of plants near your desk to freshen your space then leave the room ready for an effective day of work next time you head in there.