Top Tools to Help Sort and Organize Your Workspace

A disorganized workspace can reduce productivity. The disorganization of work processes and the workplace often leads to burnout, missed deadlines, a complication in relationships with colleagues, and so on. Maintaining a professional workspace, whether at home or at the office, can help you feel more at ease while working and have your tools near reach.

Although organizing just takes a few minutes, mastering it requires more effort. In this post, we’ll outline what a messy workplace could seem, offer tips and organizing tools to help you stay productive, as well as arrange and streamline all of your work procedures.

What is an unorganized workspace?

A disorganized workspace leads to problems at work. Clutter and discomfort terribly interfere with focusing on work tasks. In such conditions, a person cannot concentrate and can get stressed due to the inability to find everything that is necessary for work. Let’s look at the factors of workplace disorganization that can seriously reduce productivity potential:

1. Garbage 

Garbage can affect relationships with other people in the office. Untidy workplaces are seen as less responsible, more nervous, and less pleasant to talk to than their organized counterparts. This perception of an employee negatively affects how others interact with him and can have negative consequences for his career. 

2. Unsystematic document storage

One day you will thank yourself if you organize all your working documents into containers, shelves and folders at once, without letting them pile up randomly on your desktop. Being organized and productive will allow you to complete tasks much faster and better

3. Digital clutter

If you still have not figured out your smartphone and spend hours to find the right document or letter in your email inbox, you have a digital mess. To clean up your digital workspace, it is recommended to remember how many files you keep unsigned and how many important documents and contracts are in the next “New Folder”.

4. Personal Items

No one forbids having your own mug, a pair of removable shoes, a personal first-aid kit at the workplace. However, it is important to observe a certain limit. Who likes a table littered with unwashed mugs or plastic food boxes? When it comes to personal items on your workspace, stick to what it essential. Other personal items, first aid kit and hygiene items are best stored in the bottom drawer of the table or in the locker, if available.

5. Being late

Being late might cause projects to be interrupted and the day to become disorganized. Maintaining professionalism in the office is important, particularly if your tardiness has an impact on other work procedures. To decrease tardiness, managers might work closely with staff to provide flexible schedules.

The Best Ways to Improve Productivity

First of all, we need to determine the factors that affect productivity. Work environment, the HR strategy, the right tools, and the use of modern technology – all affect performance management.

1. Avoid multitasking

Multitasking used to be considered a good practice, but today it is clear that this approach reduces efficiency and productivity. Multitasking is distracting, draining, and interferes with optimal workflow coordination.

2. Set small goals

The main goal of the project can be ambitious and large-scale, so it should be divided into smaller ones. Set clear short-term goals within the overall goal of the project.

3. Take breaks

To maintain a productive working rhythm, it is very important to take breaks from time to time. For example, you can use the Pomodoro method. It involves intensive focused work for 25 minutes with 5-minute breaks. You can change the duration of the work and rest intervals according to your needs and wishes. After all, your mental health in the workplace is what matters most.

4. Chat with team members

Working in a team and with clients, you should constantly exchange information about the status of the project. When questions or difficulties arise, it is very important not to be silent, but to report that help is needed. 

5. Use productivity tools

Services are available on the Internet to help you determine your level of productivity and improve it. What are productivity tools? These are special working messengers, task trackers, financial calculators, and much more. Today, the global market offers a large number of productivity tools. Let’s talk about the most popular and convenient productivity tools and look at their main advantages.

Work and Time Management tools

To help you manage your workload better, here are some of the top task managers that can assist teams in planning and managing their work. These tools can help boost productivity by making sure that everyone is informed of the team’s strategy, processes, and responsibilities.

Tools for Work Management

1. Kanban Zone. As a virtual collaboration tool, Kanban Zone makes it easier for virtual teams to work together and complete projects by keeping track of their tasks and progress using Kanban. Kanban Zone makes it easy for teams to visualize even the most complex workflows to make it easier to track work progress from one step to the next.
2. Teamwork. In Teamwork, you have some nice features that make collaboration more efficient, like bulletin boards, task lists, Gantt charts, calendars, tasks, and subtasks.
3. Monday.com. Monday.com helps improve alignment and productivity by tailoring processes to your team’s needs. It can help you optimize processes for maximum productivity and organize work, processes, tools, and files in a single system. It can connect teams, eliminate silos, and help you maintain a single source of truth.
4. ClickUp. This is a great tool for organizing the work of small and medium-sized teams working in the field of marketing. Advantages: many features (dashboards, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, tracking, creation of task lists or checklists, document collaboration, calendar, messenger integration, teamwork).
5. Trello. Trello is a fantastic visual collaboration tool that gives your team a shared understanding of all of your projects in a lighthearted and engaging manner. Find out why Kanban Zone is a better Kanban project management tool vs. Trello.
6. Taskeo. This multifunctional cloud provides ample opportunities for project management and business management in general. With Taskeo’s project management features, you can easily manage your team’s workload, set reminders and recurring tasks, and create task and project templates.
7. Keap. Utilize CRM analytics dashboard to visualize sales statistics and insights. Obtain insightful knowledge from your data to guide your business decisions.
8. MindMeister. The core concept should be the central focus of your mind map when you first begin. Unlimited themes can be made, and colors can be added for flair and clarity. Add context to topics as you develop your map by including attachments, integrated media, and other elements.

Tools for Time Management 

Probably, there is not a single person in the world who has never suffered from time management problems. Prioritization, planning, and structure are the three main components of almost all time management techniques now in use. Only a tiny portion of time management approaches use a complicated integration of all three concepts; the majority rely on prioritizing and organization. Fortunately, modern society has invented tools to reduce stress and help people discipline and improve their time management. We have identified three main tools: an application for planning your personal and work time; an analyst of your work processes and a guardian of procrastination.

1. TIME Planner. The program combines the functions of a task manager with reminders and a time control tool that allows you to analyze work efficiency over a certain period.
2. TopTracker. The tracker will track which sites you visit and how often you are distracted from work tasks. All information can be visualized on a dashboard.

Sharing and recording your screen

Screen recorders are great helpers to save time and record the screen of important online meetings, workshops, and webinars for delayed viewing. The communication problem is usually resolved with Slack and Zoom apps. Use the following tools, though, if you haven’t dealt with one of the earlier “Excessive workload” factors yet and you’re unable to participate fully in the video meetings.

1. Movavi Screen Recorder. A very easy and low-resource-demanding tool that lets you record screen footage and live broadcasts. You can simultaneously record from multiple audio and video streams, capturing the entire screen as well as a fragment. Just do not forget that you can record only with the permission of the chat participants.
2. Loom. It is a free service that allows users to record short video messages and share them with colleagues.
3. TinyTake. It is free software for Windows and Mac computers that allows for screen capture and video recording. You may also use a link to share any folders or files from your local computer.

Conclusion

By overcoming barriers to productivity, you can improve your performance, and advance your career. All you need is to understand how to stay organized and have a focused mind full of determination. Having a well-managed digital space can improve your efficiency and productivity. This will save you a lot of time and help you focus on what’s important.