How to declutter piles of paperwork from your office desk
Are you constantly reaching across piles of paperwork to get to items on your desk? Do you waste countless hours each week sifting through last year’s bills to find this month’s employee onboarding forms? Do you assume you’ve lost a document, only to find it days later underneath a stack of business letters?
If so, then you’re probably suffering from the most productivity-killing condition in modern offices: clutter.
But if you think those piles of paper are just an annoyance, you’re mistaken. Too much paper clutter has serious effects on your productivity, the environment, and your year-end business ledger.
– According to Pricewaterhousecoopers, finding a lost document costs a company $122 on average.
– Each year, Americans consume 700 pounds of paper on average, with 26 million tonnes ending up in landfills.
– The paper cost per employee each year is roughly $80.
– On average, it takes an employee roughly 25 minutes to return to their task after an interruption. Any extra time wasted during that interruption for finding documents is only a further loss in productivity.
So whether or not we’re talking about a desk in the office or just a desk at home cluttered with personal paperwork, knowing how to get rid of paper clutter will save you time, money, and ultimately the environment. Here are a few quick tips for cleaning things up immediately:
Table of Contents
How to declutter your desk – fast
Most of us get daunted as soon as we’re faced with a task of this magnitude; that’s why so many keep putting it off until it’s too late. With these tips for organizing paper clutter, you can have room to breathe in no time.
– Get it all in one place: If you have papers all around your home, get them into a pile on the desk now.
– Know exactly what you need to keep: When deciding which papers you need to keep, think of things in two categories: documents requiring action and things to keep on file. The former are things such as bills, and the latter things such as five years of tax records, mortgage papers, school forms for kids, and medical papers.
– Label your folders: Label your folders depending on papers, and begin stuffing each one with the requisite ingredients. Finances, bills, tax information, school forms, IDs, and warranties all belong here. Find yourself a small, two-drawer cabinet and arrange accordingly.
Even with these tips, taking care of all these documents is a lot of extra work, let alone sharing them with others and keeping them secure.
There is a better way.
Digitize your documents with Soda PDF
Digitizing your documents helps avoid all the issues that arise from using old-fashioned paper. No more dusty filing cabinets, lost documents, delayed wait times, wasted money, or tonnes of paper in landfills each year. Going digital offers major savings in every area of your business, from supplies and procurement to employee productivity and new-joiner onboarding. Once you set yourself up, you’ll benefit from:
– Multi-layer security authentication
– Instant access to documents in the cloud rather than printing, meaning you can share with anyone around the world at any time
– Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that allows you to scan your paper documents and transform them into digital files for safekeeping (find out how it works here!)
– Major cost savings: no wasted money on paper, no need to buy filing cabinets, no lost documents, etc.
– Archive documents with PDF/A, ensuring full access far into the future
– Instant document creation capabilities with a range of creative features
– Countless days of processing saved with ESIGN for fast electronic signatures
– And more!
If your home or office is suffering from stacks of paperwork that are slowly turning into coasters for your cups of coffee, then you are wasting time and money that could easily be given right back to you by digitizing your documents. Knowing how to get rid of clutter is only half the battle. If you want to declutter paperwork piles from your office desk, the best way is with Soda PDF.
If saving money, protecting the environment, and increasing the productivity of your workforce sounds like something you’d be interested in, then find out how Soda PDF can revolutionize your business processes!
