8 Organization Tips to Improve Your Workflow

Disorganization in the workplace can have many negative impacts. Lower-quality work, missed deadlines, and wasted time on unproductive tasks can be just a few side effects of a disorganized workplace.

Fortunately, there are ways you can streamline your work. Check out our eight tips to help professionals do their job more efficiently — whether you work in a traditional office or from home.

Which ones will you try today?

1. Keep Important Information Visible With an Efficient Filing System

Out of sight can quickly become out of mind, leading to missed deadlines or wasted time searching for the information you need. You can try revamping your filing system by storing frequently used documents in clear plastic folders with colored tabs that you can keep handy in a file organizer on your desk.

By putting the most recent or pressing information in the front of the clear folders, you don’t even have to open them to see what you need to do. Color-coding the tabs can help you spot the folder you need at a glance.

2. Schedule Time to File

Filing systems only work if you take the time to file the papers. We’ve all experienced that paper backup, where we “pile” rather than “file.”

Blocking time to attend to this important task can help make sure it gets completed and nothing gets inadvertently overlooked. Try to look at your week and schedule time on your calendar for filing, like any other must-do.

Friday afternoon might be a logical time; you can review what’s been accomplished over the past few days and create a work plan for the following week.

 

3. Give Admin Duties to Your Email System

It’s amazing how many organizational tasks your email application can handle if you know how to use it efficiently. Investing time to understand the functions now will pay ongoing dividends in time saved.

Try scheduling messages to be sent at a specific time or setting up prompts so that messages from a certain sender always hit the top of your inbox.

 

4. Organize Your Inbox

Speaking of your inbox, resist the urge to keep all the messages in a big, confusing jumble; instead, create folders to organize the messages by project, client, or action needed-just as you would with hard copies.

You can even have one specifically for items you need to accomplish that day or week. An organized inbox can help you stay on track and verify that everything is moving forward on schedule.

 

5. Make Temporary To-Do Lists With Sticky Notes

Need to remember to call someone at 10 a.m.? A sticky note on your computer monitor is a convenient and prominent visual reminder. Or, put one on your office door to remind you of an important file you need to take to your 2 p.m. meeting.

Sticky notes can also help keep you updated on unfinished business. If you have several notes still hanging around at the end of the day, add them to tomorrow’s to-do list.

 

6. Set Calendar Reminders

Sticky notes are handy for last-minute reminders, but if it’s for a task too far in the future, they can quickly become easy to overlook. In that case, try setting reminders in your calendar application for project deadlines.

You can start with the deadline for completing and submitting the project. Then, work backward to set alerts for project components along the way. You can even set additional notices to remind you to check on the progress, particularly if you’re waiting for input from other people or teams. 

 

7. Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

Figure out your go-to keyboard buttons for your email and word functions to create a huge time-saver for repetitive functions. For example, it’s great just to hit the “R” key or “CTRL+R” to reply to a message or the “F” key or “CTRL+F” to forward a message in an email.

You can also add extensions to your browser that make copying and pasting multiple items easier.

 

8. Employ the KISS Principle (Keep It Simple, Smarty)

The easiest tip is to keep it simple. Whatever task you’re handling, the more steps there are in the process, the greater the chance that errors will be made. And that goes for organization, too.

With every step of your organizational process, make sure it’s saving time rather than adding a to-do to your overflowing list.