little john kin

From time to time it becomes necessary to clean up your office. After several months (even years) you’ve accumulated a wealth of paper, cheap office supplies and other junk that now is just clutter. Usually the drive for a clean-up comes after you’ve stumbled over the same pile of paper for the umpteenth time. The irritation has now prompted you into action.

Usually it doesn’t take much planning to clean the office. You grab a dustbin bag and you start throwing unwanted things away. However, there may be important documents among the paper that you want to throw away and you now have to spend time sorting through everything. This can take a long time and you now require some sort of plan to get through this project.

One of your options could be to designate an area of your office that you can clean per day. This will help you not being overwhelmed by the enormity of the clean-up and also to keep your concentration. The annoying part is that you will be cleaning out your office continually for a number of days. If you need it cleaned quickly this plan won’t work.

Another plan is to employ an assistant to help you. This will mean that you can get through the paper quickly, or even the other stuff while you sift through the paper. If the assistant is helping you, s/he will need to know what qualifies as important and what not. It will probably take more time and energy to train them or give them guidance than it would take for you to just do it yourself.

Depending on how much work there is, you could try to involve your partner and / or the kids. Once again: You will have to sort out the papers while they clean up the rest, otherwise you may end up losing some important stuff. If your partner knows what to look out for, s/he can help sorting through the important parts of the office and thereby help you get finished sooner.

It is never fun to have to clean up a neglected office. The flipside, however, is that it is so much more fun going to work if your office is neat, clean and organised. Unfortunately the only person that can do the clean-up is you. You will have to decide what is important, what is junk and how much of each you want to keep hold of. Some things may have sentimental value and you will want to keep them, while others are just things that were cute at the time but have now lost their charm. It is important to know the difference.