Maximise your productivity with these spring cleaning tips!

Benjamin Franklin once said “for every minute spent organising, an hour is earned”. This guy was so organised that he was able to invent lightning rods, bifocal lenses and a urinary catheter. If you don’t know what that is, don’t look it up.

But do you know what the secret to old Benjamin’s success was? Superior intellect? I’m sure it helped, but spring cleaning helped more.

Spring Cleaning is an essential activity both at home and at your office. If you’ve been hibernating under stacks of mislabelled files and used coffee mugs this winter, it’s time to emerge into the light. 

We’re a pretty organised bunch here at Archive Boxes Australia, our products have been helping people keep organised all across Australia. Here are our 5 tips which we personally use for our yearly spring cleaning.

1: Get inspired.

We aren’t gonna sugar coat it, a lot of offices look about as exciting as a bucket of wet cement.

But it doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way, wet cement is always ready to be moulded into something nicer.  

But if you don’t have a knack for interior design there’s no need to worry. Like most things there are people out there that have already done the thinking for you.  

Pinterest is a great place to seek interior design inspiration. Instagram also has some great hashtags and accounts dedicated to office space #goals.

2: Divide your Office Space

Now that you have a vision of how you want your office to look, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty. A lot of online resources universally agree that the best way to begin is by dividing your workspace into areas which serve specific purposes.

This could look like;

• A designated workspace for your computer
• A specific organised storage space
• A filing area for your archives
• Maybe you’re even lucky (baller) enough to have your own coffee section or a library.

3: Prioritise the equipment you use more often

A well designed and organised office is a functional and effective workspace. This means that time wastage is minimised through good forward planning. Allowing you to save time and stay in the zone by finding what you need right away. 

So when you are thinking about where to store your stuff, first try to categorise them according to what you use from most to least.

Then when you are putting your office back together post-clean place your most used equipment within arms reach of your standard workspace. Place the items you don’t into your storage area. It's useful to have some good quality storage containers for this stage, you can find them here.

4: Don’t forget the digital mess.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am terrible at keeping my documents organised. I’ve got folders within folders, non-specific document names etc. All kinds of things which make finding anything which I haven’t used recently a really inefficient task.

Taking the time to get your hard drive sorted once and for all is highly worthwhile. Make sure to bin anything which is no longer useful, rename files and allocate specific folders for specific work. You could even move some files which you don’t need presently to an archive folder if you think you will come back to them later.

5: Organise the paperwork in your “paper free” office

A paperless office is great in theory but it is always easier said than done. Files, notepads just seem to pile up out of thin air. During your office spring clean make sure to take a good look at these files. Securely destroy what you need to. Make sure that your office space has room for a shelving unit which can hold archive boxes to store the files you still need.

We are known for our archive boxes here at Archive Boxes Australia (surprise, surprise). Our boxes are shelf friendly, light and strong and with our new colour range you'll be sure to find a box to fit your new design aesthetic.

And so those are our top 5 tips for an efficient and effective spring clean this year. But the most important thing is to build organised habits. Always label and file correctly, put things back where they belong and clean regularly. And of course stock up on the right office supplies at Archive Boxes Australia!