Clutter prevents productivity and growth, which often makes one feel stagnant in the workplace. When you start to notice that your mess is decreasing your motivation, it’s time to declutter your office once and for all to maximize your creativity and efficiency.
Decluttering is often very easy. If your office has multiple locations consider hiring a moving company to move furniture to your other location. That way you utilize the assets you already have while achieving your decluttering goals.
The workplace is the most important place in a company. It impacts productivity and leads to higher employee retention rates when it’s well-maintained with healthy working environments for all employees.
At a time when almost everything is digital, there is little reason to let mounds of papers, files and notebooks clutter your office space. To be productive both at school and work, you need to keep things organized. This way, you won’t need to buy essay online at the last minute to meet your assignment deadline or stay till midnight in the office to finish a report. A clear desk or workspace means a clear mind when approaching work tasks.
According to CallDrip, a study by the National Association of Professional Organisers found that cluttered workspaces can lead to a company’s financial loss equivalent to 10% of a manager’s salary.
It’s essential for your productivity — and your mental health — to keep your workspace clutter-free. It may seem like a daunting task, but the incentive to start organizing is undeniable.
After all, if you are an employer, imagine what message a desk full of clutter sends to your employees — and vice versa. A messy workspace doesn’t exactly instil confidence.
Your messy desk has more disadvantages than you are aware of. These are the main ways that office clutter can impact your work productivity:
Table of Contents
It’s Distracting
Clutter has a way of diverting our attention away from the task at hand. The Princeton Neuroscience Institute did a study that showed that the more things in your view (i.e. the more mess visible on your desk), the more things that are competing for your attention.
The more things you see, your mind has a harder time deciding what to focus on. In other words, the more things on your desk you can see, the more distracted you can get from a work task.
It Hinders Creativity
There’s a reason why there is a national “clean off your desk” day — keeping your desk neat is essential to keeping you motivated and inspired at work. Some have suggested that clutter helps creativity, but that only rings true for some individuals.
Others may say that when the stress of your desk occupies your mind, and you can’t even begin to start cleaning your space, there is no room left to really think creatively.
Clutter can be stifling, especially for organized personalities who work best in a clean space — but can’t seem to purge their desk of the mess that has accumulated over time.
It Slows You Down
According to Entrepreneur, a survey found that the average worker can waste up to $4,8000 just trying to find something. Keeping your workspace clean will help improve your efficiency and help increase your company’s productivity as a whole.
Another study done by the National Association of Professional Organizers showed that being organized will save you 60 minutes a day. Imagine how efficient you would be if you could find all the things that you were looking for, and didn’t get distracted?
Clutter isn’t only physical, it creates a vicious mental cycle that makes it hard to work efficiently and live a healthy active life.
It Causes Stress
There are many ways that clutter can cause you stress at work. The presence of clutter is
inherently stressful because you don’t know how to even approach starting to clear up your workspace.
Clutter has a way of stressing us out, causing anxiety, and hindering our ability to perform at our full potential in a workspace — and this rings true for employees and employers.
Be sure to start taking the steps to de-clutter your workspace — you won’t regret it.
About Carson Derrow
