Having a well-organized desk can help boost your productivity and make your home or office look nicer. Here are some tips for setting up and maintaining a beautifully organized desk. 

If you’re wondering what you can do to become more efficient at work, take a look at your desk. If it’s messy and hasn’t been reorganized in months (or maybe even years), it’s time to do a bit of spring cleaning. Having a messy desk can make it much harder to get anything done. When your workspace is covered in clutter, you waste precious time trying to find stationery and other productivity tools. Even when you aren’t busy searching through the mess on your desk to find something, clutter can be distracting and interfere with your concentration. For the sake of your productivity, it’s best to learn how to organize your desk. Here’s how you can make a functional and aesthetically pleasing out of your messy desk. 

Add a Shelf (Or a Few!) Above Your Desk

One of the reasons you might have a cluttered desk is that you don’t have enough storage space to keep your items well organized. If your desk doesn’t come with many shelves or drawers, think about adding some storage space to your work area. If your desk faces a wall, you can add some shelves above it. This works better in your home – you’ll probably have to get someone’s permission to make changes to the interior of your workplace. If you have a lot of memos that tend to be flying all over the place, you can also add a small bulletin board above your desk to pin them to. 

Arrange Supplies By Color

If you have a lot of open storage space around your desk, you can make it more functional and aesthetically pleasing if you organize your supplies by color. Arranging things by color is very visually satisfying, and you’ll be able to find anything you need quickly. Need a red pen? There it is, with your red notebook and red scissors! 

Get a Few Desktop Organizers

While it’s best to avoid having clutter pile upon it, you’ll probably want to keep a few items on your desk. It’s nice to keep the tools and supplies you’re always reaching for close by. Get some organizers for these items! Caddies with compartments for various tools, such as pens, staplers, and paper clips are particularly useful. If you use a lot of techs and have chargers and cords dangling around, make sure to get a caddy that has space for them. It’s especially important to use organizers if there are a lot of files or documents that you need to be able to access quickly. A small desktop file organizer will keep papers that you need to reference quickly from getting lost inside a messy pile. 

Organize Your Desk Drawers 

After getting the surface of your desk and the space around it organized, it’s time to tackle the drawers. Since few other people see the inside of your desk drawers, you may be tempted to leave them cluttered. However, doing so will just lead to interruptions in your workflow when you need a particular tool or office supply. Don’t let messy desk drawers get in the way of your productivity! Use drawer dividers to keep everything in its place. As long as you consistently keep all of your tools in their desk divider compartments, they’ll be there when you need them. 

Think About Your Workspace Lighting 

You might think lighting doesn’t have much to do with organization. However, what kind of lighting you have and where you place it can make a difference when it comes to organizing your desk. If your desk doesn’t have much surface space but you keep a desk lamp on it, you might want to reconsider your lighting situation. Keeping a lamp on a desk with little workspace doesn’t give you much room to get things done. It’ll make your desk feel much more cramped and cluttered.

If this is the case, switch to overhead lighting or a floor lamp. You’ll be able to work much more comfortably. Another thing you should do while organizing your desk is to take a look at your workspace under bright lighting. Many of us like to work under soft, dim desk lamps. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s easy to miss dust and debris that need to be cleaned up if your workspace is never well lit. Make sure to check to see if your desk needs cleaning every once in a while.