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Cleaning Alphabet for Indexers: O-S

© Dawney Spencer

We're continuing on in our series of cleaning our offices, and so far, we've gone from A though N. This monrth, we'll look at O though S.

O is for Obsessiveness. Your office is one place you want to be obsessive about, when it comes clutter, neatness, dust, and other stuff like that. Once you've got it cleaned up, decluttered, and such, be obsessive about keeping it up. You don't want to waste all of your hard work, and have the mess return. Just a few minutes each day will keep your office in tip-top shape. Be obsessive about clutter.

P is for Papers. I'm a paper freak. I love paper. White paper. Pastel colored papers. Bright, bold colored papers. Large sheets of paper. Small sheets of paper. Post-it notes of every size, legal size pads, junior legal size pads, regular-sized sheets of paper. Paper. Paper. Paper. I love paper.

But, I have to make sure I have a place for all that paper. Otherwise, it gets all dog-eared and dirty. Not good.

One thing I found that works well for storage of odd-ball sizes of paper that are smaller than a regular-sized sheet (8/5" x 11") are photo storage boxes. You can fit all sizes of paper in these boxes. Find a box that has a decor/coloration that matches your office, and put on a shelf.

I go through a ton of Post-It notes for a variety of reasons, so I keep these stacks on my desk in the office supplies cubes built into my desk.

All the other pads of paper, lying around in a mess on my desk, fit neatly into one of those photo storage boxes, and then the box fits on the shelf. I keep one pad handy, but the rest of the pads are stored, neatly, not getting dirty or dog-eared.

This helps keep the visual clutter to a minimum, but the paper various sized papers are handy when I need them.

Q is for Quagmire. Does this describe your financial record-keeping? Is it time to buy a software program? Is it time to take your records (shoebox or otherwise) to a higher level, meaning a professional?

I'm still working on this myself. I know that software will not work for me. In my former job as a cost engineer, my boss required me to keep a few things in my head at all times: 150 cost centers with their financial standings and variances, a $15M budget, and exactly where we were at to within $1,000. Yeah, believe me, I don't need software to track my tiny budget with one cost center! I'm used to generating any financial report I need in my head, thanks to prior demands from a great boss. Little did I know what he was training me for--my own business!!!