21 Tips for Decluttering Your Life at the Office

Make a spring cleaning list for your business. From your marketing to your office, customers and employees, websites, products, and expenses – business organization is essential to your success. It’s time to get things in order; tidy up and make sure all is new and sparkly. Organize your business and declutter your life with these 21 easy tips.

1. Clean Out Your Project Board

Do you use Trello or some other type of digital project board? Maybe you’re old school and work with an actual board or paper files. However you jump from project to project and map out your strategies for the year, odds are there are some professional to-dos that have been sitting there for far longer than others. Is the project something that is still valuable? If not, then get rid of it. It’s lingering and has become a glaring reminder of something you’ve never completed. If it’s still valuable then bump it to the front of your spring cleaning list; get it done and move on.

2. Fresh Marketing

Spring is time to pull out some new ideas. Get colorful. Take a look at your budget and see what you have room for. New ideas don’t have to be expensive; get creative and think of ways to generate fresh content without breaking the bank.

What marketing campaigns were unsuccessful last year? See what you can do to improve them or know when to cut your losses and try something different. It’s all about being authentic. What do you think your brand brings best to your target market? How do you improve their lives better than anyone else? Show this to your customers in a real and relatable way. Be innovative and make sure you share your marketing campaigns across the proper channels for maximum visibility; plenty of great campaigns go unnoticed without a strategy that gets them in front of an audience.

3. Expenses

Keep invoices and recipients organized using any number of digital programs like Expensify or Zoho Expense. It’s also time to go over your expenses with a fine-tooth comb and see where your budget went last year. What increased your bottom line and what took away from it? Where can you make adjustments to improve your return for the months ahead?

4. A Renewed Look for the Office

Improve your office décor to boost employee morale. Hire a professional cleaning crew to come in and perform a deep clean. Add new decorations, air-purifying plants, artwork, employee highlights; use innovative things about your company to fill the space – make it unique to your business! See our comprehensives guide for turning your office into a creative haven: The Complete Guide to Office Décor.

Organize stock rooms correctly, and label everything. Putting things in their proper place and making them easily accessible will ensure better time management. Productivity plummets when employees have to go on a wide-spread for the things they need.

6. Declutter Your Desk

Desks can start looking pretty shabby. We build up things that we don’t need but are afraid to throw away. Read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, it may bring you some inspiration. But remember, all suggestions on how to organize your life and your office must be taken at face-value. While freeing up some space may help to declutter your mind, everyone is different; some of us have very personal stories behind each object we own and do well with a bit of clutter to get the creative juices flowing. Some of the objects on or in our desks are necessary to our jobs and can’t be thrown away. But here’s a suggestion: start with a natural cleaner and polish the surfaces of your desk while ridding your keyboard of dust and crumbs; it’s better for your health and will add a renewed freshness to your workday.

7. Website

Could your website use a revamp? For spring, try pops of color, a minimally gorgeous approach, and a touch of modern. The colors you use say a lot about your business. If your website looks dated, it’s time for a refresh. Also, take the time to look over your content; is it still relevant, would users still find it engaging, does it hit all the SEO markers? Ahrefs offers excellent tools to measure the success of your pages for search. Make sure there are no dead links, your products and services are current, and that you are coming up on all the major search engines for your categories and keywords.

8. Products

Are some of your products looking tired? Over the past year, how much have you sold? There are three things that you can do with a product; keep it the same, improve it, or get rid of it. For a top-selling product this can be tricky, do you develop it or keep it the same? If you change it, you run the risk of upsetting your loyal customers, but with the right modifications, you can actually increase your business. Do a split test; make the modifications but offer the old product as well – see which one performs better.

For a product that isn’t selling, you must examine if it’s worth your time and resources to improve it. Alternatively, would it just be better to cut your losses and direct your efforts to something more profitable?

9. Services

It’s great to offer some new services or improve on the ones you already have. You should be continually coming up with new ways to improve the customer experience. Discard services that no longer apply to your organization or haven’t proved successful for you or your customers.

10. Delegate Responsibilities

You can’t tackle everything, and the adage of work smarter not harder really applies here. If you work with or manage a team be confident in their abilities and know that each employee has a specific skill-set. Go over your to-do list and see which tasks can be delegated; a team can bring new ways of doing these tasks that can elevate the outcome. If you are trying to take on too many jobs at once, you won’t be dedicating an appropriate amount of time to ensure maximum quality for each. If you are overextending yourself professionally, other areas of your life will suffer too. A work-life balance is necessary to perform at your best in and out of the office.

11. Customer Relationship Management

Answer all of your customers. Do you have reviews or customer-related responses that are piling up? Tend to them. Respond to reviews, good and bad. See how you can help. Create or build out your FAQ page. Improve your products and services by tailoring them to the needs and recommendations of your customers. Address all concerns. Reach out to clients to say hello, offer a discount, or loyalty program. Show you’re available, grateful, and continually striving to be better – build those relationships – and stay on top of them.

Digital CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot will help you to better manage all your customer relationships by organizing in-depth customer data and contact information while also offering tools to improve sales management. A good CRM tool will also help you acquire new customers. You can manage marketing campaigns, keep track of orders, monitor service issues, and better recognize sales opportunities.

12. Thank Every Employee

Thank, and if you can, reward your employees for their efforts with more than just a paycheck. Celebrate milestones. Send a card on anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and more. Host in or out-of-the-office get-togethers, team building exercises, and parties. We put this off far too often, especially when we’re busy. We socialize less with our employees and sometimes stunt the growth of our relationships with others for the sake of time. You must prioritize making your employees feel valued; this is crucial to not only your personal growth but the success of your business. Employees are long-term investments; if they feel undervalued or unappreciated everything suffers. Do not put this off any longer; thank every employee personally, and often.

13. Plan Everything in Advance

Schedule social media campaigns, email campaigns, and direct mail campaigns all in advance. Automated social media management tools like Hootsuite, email management tools like Constant Contact, and direct mail management tools like SendPro will help to ensure a more efficient process. Give yourself adequate time to work on projects for the months ahead, and get them out of the way early to avoid buildup and the stressful clutter of too many tasks against a ticking clock.

14. Organize Passwords

Everything digital requires a password these days, and it’s easy to forget them, especially for all the software, accounts, and systems you use at the office. LastPass – it will change your life. Lower your stress and aggravation with a user-friendly system that puts all your passwords in one place. LastPass keeps your passwords, usernames, and information protected, then inputs them when you need them; it’s a widely-used tool that cuts down on wasted time.

15. Organize Notes

Evernote is a digital program that helps to organize your notes, files, and more, allowing you to put them into accessible folders that will ensure a more streamlined business day. You can link all Evernote accounts to your email, and whether you are using the desktop app on your home computer or a version of it at work, all your files immediately go to the same place.

Several companies also offer smart notebooks and smart pens; great if you still enjoy the old school approach of writing everything down but want to take advantage of some digital advancements in organization. I personally feel more comfortable with a pen and a pad while taking notes; it allows me to get my ideas down faster, I retain more information, I feel less restricted, and often, think more creatively. A smart notebook gives you the freedom of taking notes in this way but transfers them all to digital files. Take a look at the Rocketbook Everlast; it has reusable pages that give you the ability you to transfer handwritten notes to your favorite note-taking apps like Evernote and Google Docs. If you are looking for a smartpen, check out the Iris Notes Air 3; it allows you to write in any notebook you choose and coverts each pen-stroke to a digital format inside their app. If you do a lot of illustrations, you may also want to learn more about Bamboo Folio.

Now it’s time to go through your previous notebooks. Organize all notes that still apply, categorize them, and make them quickly accessible for reference.

16. Clean Out Your Inbox

Many popular email systems like Gmail and Outlook offer an option to archive your emails. You can set up your inbox to continually archive your emails after a designated period, if you haven’t done so already. See the instructions for Gmail and Outlook. Now it’s not to go back through your emails and delete what you don’t need. This task may be daunting, but once it’s complete, you will feel so much better.

17. Streamline Employee Sharing

Tools like Slack, Trello, Google Drive, and Dropbox will allow teams to organize, share, and monitor project progress.

18. Declutter Your Computer

Files keep building up on your computer, and there are likely plenty that you no longer need. Clearing memory on your computer will improve its ability to function quicker and with minimal issues, making for a more productive workday. Going through your old files can also yield campaigns and ideas you may have forgotten about that can be improved or repurposed.

19. Update Software

Many computer programs and applications offer updates that can improve user experience. Learn what updates you could benefit from and monitor new ones consistently.

20. Antivirus

Confirm that your antivirus software is up to date and doing its job. Are you free and clear? Make sure. Take a look at this article from techradar for the best antivirus software of 2019.

21. Data Backup

Is your data backing up correctly? Checking this now and consistently moving forward is a must. For Mac users, Apple’s Time Machine makes a pretty good guarantee that you are protected, offering an automatic recovery and backup system that is built into their computers. PC users that are shopping around for the best data backup software may want to check out Acronis True Image or IDrive. Looking for a free option? Try Aomei Backupper. Aomei Backupper also offers several more advanced packages with a subsequent pricing structure.

Improve Your Work Experience

At CardsDirect, we want to improve your work and life experiences through successful relationships. Let us know how we can help.