Put Your Career in High Gear with and Organized Workspace

When it comes to really getting things done at work and - dare it be said - actually enjoying a job, your first step to doing it right is organizing your workspace.

Simply by organizing your workspace, you will find things more quickly, arrive on time (and not in a rush) for deadlines, appointments and meetings. This is the most neglected task among employees and yet it is the cause of such an incredible amount of grief and stress. It is estimated by the American Demographics Society that Americans alone waste about nine million hours are wasted every single day. If that is the sum for one country, imagine the global total of lost time on a daily basis.

From now on, make sure that you're contributing as little as possible to this vast quantity of lost time and enhancing your own work life at the same time. You'll be more efficient, less frustrated, more productive and less likely to wait around for that next promotion!

Use the following list of workspace organization tips to get yourself going:

- Identify each of the major categories of items that you keep in your workspace. Use categories such as operational items (phone numbers, pens, instructions, etc); customer files; product samples; contracts and receipts; future projects, etc.

- Sort through every single item, file, and paper in your workspace and arrange them into piles that represent the categories you created in the previous step.

- Weed each category by removing everything that is not absolutely vital. For the rest of the stuff, give it away, put it in storage, throw it away, recycle it, or otherwise take it out of your workspace. Clutter is the enemy of organization.

- Organize the remaining items for each category so that they are ordered in a way that you can find them easily.

- Create a little "cheat sheet" to remind yourself of the categories and what they contain. This will help you remember where everything is and where you should put it back at the end of the day, until you're used to your new system.

- Purchase containers, shelving, folders, etc, to provide yourself with better organized storage. Label everything.

- Once everything is organized, maintain it. Don't just let it get cluttered and disorganized again. Spend a couple of extra minutes at the end of each day putting everything back where it belongs. This way, you start fresh the next day without any baggage from the previous day to hold you back.

By using these steps and making sure that you walk into an organized workspace every day, you'll be much happier, less stressed, and better prepared to climb the ladder!