Today, I want to talk about making our offices freaking awesome. Why? Two reasons.
#1 Having a sweet office is fun.
I mean, think about all the time you spend sitting at your desk. Don’t you want to enjoy being there?
#2 The condition of your office can actually help you be better at your job.
Seriously. Plenty of research shows that the condition of our workspaces can significantly help, or hinder, our ability to be efficient and creative.
So here’s what I want to do today. Whether you’re in an office, cubicle, or a broom closet (been there, by the way), I want to share some tips for making your workspace freaking awesome.
These are tips for getting your office more organized (because I’ve seen some of your offices, and they are scary places), and tips for making it look sweet, too.
So let’s do it. Here are 4 simple tips for making your workspace more awesome.
THROW STUFF AWAY.
Chances are, you’re storing stuff in your office that really should be tossed. It happens. Things get busy. Papers and books and supplies and random junk come into your office, but you’re too busy to make a decision in the moment about where it should go. So it accumulates. It gets shoved in a drawer or piled up. And then it turns into clutter.
Clutter is dumb. Cluttered workspaces make us less productive and more unfocused.
So throw some stuff away. Throw a lot of stuff away. De-cluttering will free up physical space in your office and mental space in your brain. It’s good for you. If you need some motivation, check out this super helpful article from my friend Mike Burns (of The Other Side of Complexity) about how to de-clutter any home or work space.
GO PAPERLESS.
Oh my goodness I hate paper. Like, so much. It’s so inefficient and it takes up so much space and it’s impossible to find anything when you need it. Go digital. It will make your life so much easier and more efficient. Here are a few ways to make it happen:
THROW AWAY YOUR FILING CABINETS. If paper has nowhere to accumulate, it won’t. When I revamped my office a few years ago, I gave myself just a single drawer for storing paper – mostly copies of my volunteers’ applications and background checks. That’s pretty much the only kind of paper I hang onto… and I love it.
THROW AWAY THE STUFF IN YOUR FILING CABINETS. A few years ago, I went through a huge five-drawer filing cabinet in our youth ministry offices. Guess what. It was filled with junk. Dumb, heavy, taking-up-space, information-you-could-find-on-Google-in-one-second, junk. So after you throw away your filing cabinets, throw away the stuff inside of them. If you find something in there that you simply can’t part with, make a digital copy. Then throw it away.
PURGE YOUR BOOKS. I love books. But, as much as I love them, physical books are kind of inefficient. And they take up a lot of space. Unless there is a book that I absolutely know I will re-read, I file my books digitally after reading them, and toss them. Here’s how I do it. I highlight my books while I read, and then transfer my highlights to a file in Evernote. With ebooks, transferring is easy – I just copy and paste. But if it’s a physical book, I make the transfer by either taking photos of the highlighted pages and pasting those photos into Evernote, or by typing out all of my highlights into Evernote. This might sound annoying, but, actually, it’s a great way to review the content I just read. Once my highlights are in Evernote, I can categorize them with tags and even search them later for specific quotes or topics. And when I’m done, I give the book away or sell it on Amazon. Clutter, gone.
ELIMINATE DISTRACTIONS.
Sit at your desk. Go ahead, do it. Now look around for potential distractions.
Are you distracted by all the activity you see through your window? Then reposition your desk or invest in some blinds.
If you have stacks of books or projects-in-progress sitting on your desk, consider moving them out of your line of sight. When you’re trying to focus on the task at hand, sometimes the visual cue of all the other stuff you have to do can cause distraction and stress.
I even deleted all the icons from the desktop of my laptop because they were too distracting.
Replace any potentially distracting visual cues with new ones that actually help you stay focused and productive. For me, that means filling my line of sight with some simple artwork and keeping just a few things on my desk – pens, my phone, a couple of books I’m reading, and blank thank you cards for my volunteers.
DO ONE SUPER COOL THING.
So we’ve talked about a bunch of functional things you can do in your office. But once your office is clutter free and organized, it’s time to make it really awesome. Our youth ministry offices are pretty cool. But it’s not because we spent a ton of money on them. We simply added one or two really cool, original features to our workspaces. I’ll show them to you, starting tomorrow. Along with some how-to’s. Yay!
And, by the way, 99u has a really great series of articles about workspace design. Check them out.
Love this. I NEED to do this. Especially the file cabinets I have not used in 8 years! I am such a pack rat it is hard, but I really appreciate the encouragement. I think I will start today.
change the locks so that people cannot go “oh this is a kid thing, it belongs in her office.” two steps forward, FIFTEEN THOUSAND STEPS BACKWARDS, amiright? 🙂
Hahaaaa I love that tip. The crap that appears in my office… can’t even handle it. One time, though, someone dropped THIS thing in my office, and I just couldn’t part with it…
Love it. nearly passed out when you said throw away your books. I’ll heal, but it hurt. haha great post though.
Fantastic! My desk is way too cluttered, I’ve been in the process of rearranging it all summer but those big events are always tornadoes of destruction in my office. But I’ve been doing your last point already this summer, added a cool feature a few weeks ago and a super practical feature yesterday.
No! Not the books! They make me look like I know what I’m doing!
Ben, I love that! Is that a glass board from IKEA? I’m doing a post about how I use those babies in my office. How did you do the text headers?
HAHAHAHA oh my gosh I cannot look away, and the longer I look at it the freaking funnier it gets. Hopefully you have that proudly displayed somewhere.
and no joke within 20 minutes of posting my comment someone summoned me to empty out a cabinet full of old youth binders and material…. so now my office, which I spent an hour and a half cleaning yesterday, is overrun with binders and crap from NINETEEN NINETY ONE. since I can’t use caps for numbers I wrote it all out for effect. aye aye aye.
1.) My office: http://statigr.am/p/395159527941758775_8206302
2.) Great article … I added it to the ‘Leadership and Youth Ministry’ Magazine: http://t.co/98BxUfHAEc
Thanks for inspiring me to clean out the old cube. I feel more productive already 🙂
I have 2 filing cabinet, and I don’t use either of them well. One has old lessons and my game book, the other has balloons, fabric, game stuff, balls, frisbees, candles, and air-horns. Maybe I should look into getting rid of one or the other, I wonder if someone at this church wants a filing cabinet.
It absolutely is. Im so mad they stopped making the glass cabinet doors, because on my other wall I have a giant one of those as a whiteboard, and it only cost $10
Is there any way you can do a panoramic of your work space to give us a big picture of your work environment?
Hey Ben! How did you make the text headers on your glass idea board?
Hey wanted to see if anyone figured out how Ben got the headers on top. is that the clear labels just printed ?
Hey Brandon, it’s the glass whiteboard from ikea and I used 3 sheets of 11×17 paper that I had printed the headers at the top of, taped to the backside of the board. Hope that helps!
Awesome thanks man!
I take all of the old student ministry t-shirts (from fall retreats, summer camps, special events, etc.) and stretch them onto 12″x12″ canvas frames. Then I hang them across the walls of my office. Great reminders of where our ministry has been and how God worked through each of those!
I always tell my students (half joking, half serious) to get me a souvenir when they travel, since I don’t get to travel much. So, on my bookshelf, I have small a collection of everything from a coconut head from Jamaica to a snow globe from Ukraine. Now, it’s both a conversation piece and a daily trip down memory lane.
Thanks for the tips on decluttering. I am not sure about doing away with my physical books. But the tip on Evernote is great. Thanks.
Link for 99u is now https://99u.adobe.com/category/workspace-design