In this guide we'll give you seven nifty hacks to use both in the office at at home, for getting the most out of a clean desk and space. The goal is to increase productivity and happiness.

Research shows 94 percent of workers feel more productive in a clean uncluttered workspace, while 77 percent say they produce a higher quality of work in a cleaner environment. Makes sense, yes?

If you want to encourage other staff to clear their spaces you can download some posters at the end of the article. 

Go paperless

You could eradicate the need for paper, but it won’t be easy, and it'll depend on the nature of your job and the organisation you work for. 

If you can manage a super organised email inbox, and demand that your colleagues email everything to you instead of handing you physical copies, you may be able to achieve this.

Cancel your subscriptions and if anyone hands you any hard copies politely tell them you are on an 'information diet'.

Our favourite apps at Warp It that help us to be paperless are Asana, Google Drive, Wunderlist and Evernote.

Reintroduce the in-tray

You're plagued by hordes of paper in your offices. Invoices, notes, receipts and tasks. So, how do you tackle all this paper? You reintroduce the in-tray! This allows you to organise your paper clutter into one A4-sized space on your desk.

You'll feel the benefit immediately as you see the bare desk before you with space for productive work. A bonus is that if all your paper documents are in one place, they won’t get lost or accidentally binned.

Stationery Amnesty

Open your desk drawers. Do you really need two staplers, seven pens and fifty paper clips?

Find out who is responsible for stationery in your office and return all surplus materials to them, and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

By encouraging this sort of behaviour you can reduce the procurement of already-owned assets in the office.

Sharing is caring! Get our guide to setting up your own Stationery Amnesty here.

Regular cleaning time

Friday afternoon is a great time, especially you are aching to get home and enjoy a relaxing weekend. Your desk is covered in junk and you aren’t going to start any new work projects until the coming week.

Take this time as your regular cleaning slot and sort your desk out. It'll soon become a great habit, and the person who will thank you most is your future self, when you arrive on Monday morning and don’t have to push aside last week’s debris.

Scan it, recycle it

Most good offices will have a state-of-the-art photocopying machine with a scanner, printer, bluetooth and who-knows what else built in.

Scanning physical documents and sending them to your data storage will protect you from loss of documents, and it makes life so much easier when you have to email them.

If a hard copy lands on your desk, get in the habit of scanning it and recycling the paper.

You can also buy a personal scanner for your desk that’s no larger than a laptop and will automatically send all your scanned files to your computer. Evernote is great for this.

Get a paper caddy

You probably have a bin already, right? Well, perhaps not.

With increased efforts to recycle and separate waste in the office, a lot of small waste-paper bins have been removed and a centralised recycling bin system installed. This shouldn’t stop you from having a small paper caddy within reach of your desk and chair. This is a holding bin before you go and recycle.

Add dusty items to your reuse system after three months

If anything sits in the same place long enough to gather dust, you really don’t need it.

Don’t be afraid to list that item on your reuse system and let it find itself a new home within the organisation.

You’ll save procurement costs and increase the internal recycling figures, which will give a small but important boost to organisational sustainability. You’ll feel good in yourself for giving to others the things that you have no need for yourself.

Productivity is part of your mindset

There's evidence that a clean and organised desk transcends into your work performance, productivity and output.

Did this help?

If these tips have proved helpful, you’re going to love our spring poster freebies!

You can download it by clicking the image below.