by Eileen Roth
Do Less, Achieve More: The Zen of Organized Work
Fifteen years in office administration may not have provided me with a deep grounding in the philosophy of Zen, but my experience did prove the truth of Zen’s premise: When you set things up to flow, they do so. Without flow, you may find that no matter how much you do, things rarely go your way. Organizing your work space is the first step to turning your tiny stream of effort into a mighty river of productivity. Rewards follow.
You work better when the layout and lighting are right, the view harmonious and free from distractions, and everything you need is within fingertip reach. A well-organized work space can increase your productivity to the tune of minutes or hours per day, days or weeks per year, while improving quality too. Do the math. How many dollars is that worth to you?
The subtle trick about this — one that I’ve seen trip up hardworking individuals and entire corporations — is that there’s no one right way to organize a workplace. Needs vary between people and jobs and across careers. That’s what keeps me paid . . . but I’m about to sign part of my paycheck over to you by clueing you in on the process. I don’t know if that’s Zen or not, but it’s a zero-risk proposition.
Choose what you want to work on first. Your business office or home office? Furniture, equipment, or layout? P-L-A-C-E summarizes the secrets of transforming any workplace to the everything-in-its-place paradigm.
Focusing on Furniture and Equipment
The first step to organizing your workplace is deciding what you need. It sounds easy — especially when many companies try to decide for you — but in fact this can be a profound process that affects what you do every day. Remember that most corporations have a procedure for allocating resources, and it never hurts to ask for what you need.
Focusing on furniture and equipment can help you assemble the right resources for your job and jettison the clutter. Do you feel hemmed in by corporate policy or a small cubicle? Read on for tactics to free your mind.
Furniture: The basics
What do you need to furnish your space for good work? Use the following discussions to start your list, marking what you have, what you want, and what you don’t need.
Finding the right desk
Working at the wrong desk is like wearing shoes that don’t fit. Some even claim it can cause blisters to the brain. Reviewing architectural plans while taking notes on the computer, for instance, makes quite different demands on a desk than paying bills and balancing your checkbook, while writing a legal brief poses requirements of its own.
The right desk provides just enough surface area to get all your jobs done (more would be a waste of room space) and a layout that allows fingertip management of each task. Assess your needs in these two dimensions and choose between three desk formats:
Standard: This is your basic rectangle, a space-efficient bet if you don’t use a computer at your desk because you’re blessed with an assistant, don’t need a computer for your job, or have a separate computer workstation. If you conduct meetings in your office, a standard desk also leaves more space for a table and chairs.
L-shaped: Add a perpendicular piece to a regular desk and you have an L shape, with the second side just right to hold a computer, to spread out papers 11-x-17 or larger, or to collate materials. If you currently get up to use a separate worktable for any of your regular tasks, get an L-shaped desk and gain fingertip management.
U-shaped: Adding a third side to the desk allows you to easily toggle between a regular desktop, a computer station, and a clear space for big projects. You can also create a U shape with your layout as described later in the chapter, which, depending on your needs, may be a better way. Stay tuned.
No matter what shape desk you choose, look for two to four small drawers and one to two file drawers to keep everything in fingertip reach. You can find more on arranging, using, and stocking your desk in Chapter 15.
Computer workstation
A computer workstation can free up desktop space for phone and paperwork and give you room to spread out all the references you need while at the keyboard. A separate station is also the way to go in an office where employees share a computer, or in a home office where an adult may want to pay bills while a child or partner works at the computer.
Find out more about organizing and using your computer workstation in Chapter 15 on the desk, and see what cyberorganization can do for you in Chapter 17.
Ergonomically comfortable chairs
You spend a lot of time in your workplace chair, so find one that cares. A good ergonomic office chair with wheels will make your life easier and back happier. Put a plastic mat on the floor for smooth rolling from the desk to the computer, credenza, bookcase, or file cabinet. If you have a separate computer workstation that’s shared or outside rolling range, get a second chair.
Guest chairs for an office are often more formal and less functional than work chairs, as people spend less time there. Be aware that placing guest chairs to face you as you sit at your desk establishes distance and puts you in the power position, which may be your intent in certain circumstances, but most meetings are more effective when conducted on an equal basis. Face your guest chairs toward each other in front of the desk and come out to sit with your visitor.
A couch is too casual for most professional settings, diluting the work attitude and encouraging colleagues to come in for a break. In a home office, a couch may serve as a constant signal to take a quick nap. Naps can be productivity tools, but you don’t need to be thinking about sleep while you work.
Deciding whether you need a meeting table
Before you clutter up your office with a table, consider whether you need one here or could use a conference room instead. If you hold many small meetings (especially impromptu ones) where privacy or prestige is important, a table is called for. A round shape can put everyone present on equal footing, but a square or rectangle provides more space. Decide which matters more to you.
Credenza or bookcase?
A table and mini-bookshelf in one, a credenza can clear off your desk by holding the books or binders you need every day inside. Put a telephone, fax machine, printer, or small copier on top to get double duty from the piece and prevent piles of paper from forming there.
If your work requires many reference materials — you’re a lawyer, human resources administrator, professor, or writer — then a bookcase is the way to get those stacks of books off the floor. The books are just temporary, you say? Until you finish this project? There will be another project afterward, and another stack to go with it.
Order an adjustable bookcase so that you can tailor the height of the shelves to the size of your materials. Place the heaviest items on the bottom shelves for ballast, things you use most frequently on middle shelves for easy access, and lighter items such as audiotape albums on the higher shelves. Organize your library by subject matter as described in Chapter 9.
Overhead bins for small-space dwellers
For offices or cubicles with limited floor space, overhead bins can ease the crunch by containing books, binders, stationery, computer paper, forms, and literature. Organize their contents by grouping like with like to establish mini- centers for different activities and putting things where you access them most — computer paper near the printer, for instance, and reference books close to the desk. Arrange books and binders by topic and paper products into flat stacking sort trays.
File and artwork cabinets
Stop! Before you buy a single file cabinet, skip to Chapter 16 and follow the file-purging instructions. See how your space and budget requirements downsize?
Next consider whether you should contain files in lateral or vertical cabinets. Vertical file cabinets, which pull out so the files are facing you, extend farther into the room in both closed and open position. Lateral cabinets, in which the files are perpendicular to you as you pull out the drawer, stick out less but take up more wall space. You may need to do your layout, as explained
later in this chapter, before you make your decision.
From an efficiency standpoint, vertical files provide easier retrieval. If you need something in the front third of the drawer, you need only pull it out that far, grab your file, and go. To get any file from a lateral drawer you must pull the drawer out completely, and if what you want isn’t in the half of the drawer you can see from the front, you have to walk around to the side, which is wasted time and effort. If your space allows, go vertical.
Designers, artists, engineers, architects, and anyone in charge of interfacing with such positions may need a metal cabinet with large flat drawers for storing blueprints, graphic designs, and artwork. Do you have just a few? Roll them up and slip them into poster tubes.
Literature rack
From my work in associations management, I know firsthand about fact sheets and brochures, collating and compiling, trying to pull the right pieces to make a membership packet. Whether you need to put together press kits for mailings or you work as a salesperson, insurance agent, or membership manager, you could use a literature rack.
The right rack for organizing literature holds stacks flat in different tiers so the paper doesn’t bend and you can quickly find the pieces you want. Figure 14-1 provides a look.
Figure 14-1: Make fast work of information packets with a literature rack.
Are you storing literature, stationery, or forms in vertical file holders? Don’t be surprised to pull out bent pages that look sloppy and jam computer printers. Keep paper flat instead, so that the pages stay straight.
Equipping yourself
Many of us rely on a wide array of equipment, from low- to high-tech, to make our workday work. Few people, however, evaluate whether they really have the right equipment to meet their needs — no more, no less — and whether it’s optimally placed for fingertip management.
A quick equipment evaluation can help you decide what you need, where, in your office layout. Are there items that you can easily use somewhere else, such as a copier? Do you need a fax machine at your desk to save frequent trips to the firm’s central machine? After you decide what items you need in your office, jot down their dimensions for use in your layout.
For further discussion of how to select and use technology tools with twenty-first-century sense, see Chapter 17 on cyberorganization.
Peak Productivity Placement
Now is the time to put everything into place. Your goal? Fingertip management of everything you do. The way to get there? Blueprint your work space. You may not be an architect, but anyone can benefit from drawing up a floor plan to find the most productive office placement. You may discover a new way to face your desk for better concentration, hidden space for another file cabinet, or a nifty arrangement to put all your reference books within reach.
Drawing up the blueprint
Refer back to the section on blueprint basics in Chapter 3, and follow the instructions to draw your office to scale, mark the windows and doors, and create furniture cutouts. Add cutouts in a different color to represent equipment.
Start playing with placement of your cutouts on your floor plan to come up with one or more schemes that put each task within easy reach.
Purge: Get rid of all unused or ill-suited furniture and equipment. Dis-tracting artwork can be donated or go elsewhere. (Lots more on office purging is coming up in the following chapters.)
Like with like: Line up your file cabinets. Find one spot for all your books. Create work centers for different activities by grouping together everything you need for a task.
Access: Arrange your work space by placing furniture and equipment in a parallel, L-shape, or U-shape layout for better fingertip management.
•A parallel layout places furniture in two lines opposite each other — most frequently a desk and a computer workstation, credenza, bookcase, or file cabinet. Parallel layouts provide a space-efficient floor plan for jobs requiring a limited number of references and resources.
•For an L-shaped layout, furniture is arranged in two perpendicular lines to create a semi-enclosed space. Instead of turning a full 180 degrees from one side to the other as in the parallel layout, you swivel just 90 degrees from the desk to the bookcase, cabinet, credenza, or computer.
•U-shaped puts most resources within reach. You may have a desk and computer or drafting table parallel to each other, with a bookcase or file cabinet forming the base of the U. Don’t need a computer station or worktable? Put a file cabinet parallel to the desk and a bookcase at the base.
The printer should be as near the computer as possible, while the fax may be farther away. Move infrequently used equipment, reference materials, and supplies to another room. Do you have extra supplies? Return them to the supply room or cabinet.
Contain: Put files into file cabinets and books into bookcases or credenzas. Use overhead cubicle bins for binders, computer programs, or extra stationery. Under-desk drawers can keep supplies off the countertop. Finally, make sure you have a way to contain everything — for instance, add a credenza for the books and binders currently stacked on top of your workstation.
Evaluate: How do you feel when you walk into your office in the morning? How does your flow go in the thick of a project or stressful situation? How do you feel when you leave your office at the end of the day?
Figure 14-2 pictures some peak productivity layouts.
Using space effectively
Here are some more tricks of the trade that you can use to fine-tune your space once you decide on the pieces of furniture you need and arrive at a basic layout.
Use the space beneath windows by placing a desk, short bookcase, or two-drawer file cabinet there. This is not the spot for a standard bookcase, a four-drawer file cabinet, or a tall computer workstation, unless you want to lose your view.
Figure 14-2: Work space layouts that put tools at your fingertips.
Windows aside, move the desk out toward the center of the room to slip a credenza, bookcase, or file cabinet behind it. However, don’t face your desk to the wall. Feng shui, the ancient Asian philosophy of flow, and many a worker can vouch that this placement can wall up your thinking and make you susceptible to scares when people walk up behind you. Like you need more stress in your day?
Don’t face your desk directly out the door. Suddenly every passerby is a pleasant distraction, and your thinking-into-space session becomes a major interruption when a colleague catches your eye and decides to tell you about her weekend tennis match. Place your desk perpendicular to the door, out of view of people passing by, for the right combination of concentration and control.
Take a ruler and measure your files from front to back to assess how many inches of storage space you need. Allow room (1 to 2 inches) for growth. With W-A-S-T-E techniques under your belt (see Chapter 16), you won’t need much.
You should also allow clearance to pull out file cabinet drawers to double the cabinet’s depth. Typical file cabinet dimensions are:
Vertical: 15 inches (letter) or 18 inches (legal) wide by 21 inches to 36 inches deep.
Lateral: 36 inches (letter) or 42 inches (legal) wide by 18 inches deep.
Use four-drawer file cabinets to maximize your vertical space or two-drawer cabinets to provide an additional surface on which to put equipment or collate papers. The top drawer of a five-drawer model is basically only good for binders and books because the top drawer is too high to see files.
After you get your desk and file cabinets situated, add guest chairs and possibly a table to your layout, if appropriate.
Got a closet in a home office? A closet is a natural place to store supplies, especially if you add built-in or freestanding shelves. Remember to put your heaviest items — reams of paper and so forth — on lower shelves or the floor.
Natural light from windows provides a great mood boost, but can create glare when sunlight shines directly on a computer screen. Light placement is a particular concern if you work with art or design.
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p; Give your interior design and the artwork on your walls the eye. Is the effect pleasant and harmonious, or distracting or distressing? A beautiful environment can bring out your best, but anything that your eye fixes on long or that you don’t like can drag you down. Toss, donate, relocate, redo.
Tune up your workday with music
There’s a fourth dimension to your ideal office layout: sound. Studies show that the right music can power your mind for peak productivity throughout the working day. When it’s time to concentrate, slow, steady instrumental music can focus the mind and synchronize brain activity. On the other hand, you can fight fatigue on a slow day with your favorite fast and upbeat tune. Suffering from creative block? Cue up something new or unusual to force your brain cells to fire in different patterns.
Cubes without Clutter
Your cube is small, square, not very private, and sometimes noisy. But millions of valued employees call the cubicle home, and organization is all the more important to staying on top of your game when working on such limited turf.
Start your cubicle makeover with the layout process just described. All the same principles apply, though you have less space to deal with and perhaps less flexibility in terms of what goes where. You can surmount the space problem with some cool cubicle tricks: