by Lou Belcher

Created on: March 29, 2009

Spring cleaning for writers: Organize your office.

It's difficult to write with your desk piled with papers and books and the floor of your office heaped with books. That is the nature of the writer's office, however. If you are in the middle of a project, it's almost dangerous to move things around. Your office might look completely disorganized to someone wandering into it, but you know where things are. So, don't do your spring cleaning in the middle of a writing project. Wait until you are between projects, so you don't lose track of anything vital. That said, here are some suggestions on how to organize your office:

1. Survey your office and plan out your attack. If there are books everywhere, start with those. Organize your non-fiction books by topics and your fiction books by the names of authors. If you really want to organize your office for top efficiency, catalog your books by making a card for each book, or by making a data base on your computer. At the least, put the title, topic, author and location on each card or in each entry, so you'll be able to find the book when needed.

2. Purge your files. To make room for those piles of paper on your desk, you'll need to make room in your files. If you are truly a writer, you probably save every piece of paper you doodle on. You may come across a good quote and jot it down. It goes in a pile on your desk. Someone calls and you make a note of the conversation, it goes in the pile. You'll naturally get rid of some of these when you sort your piles of paper. Others will need to be saved. Before you add more to your files, go through your filing cabinets and purge (that means take out and discard) the pieces of paper you put in there last year or ten years ago when you thought you couldn't live without them. Discard the ones that you can live without. Take the others and convert as many of them to electronic files. That means put as much as the information as possible on your computer in a searchable file, and then discard the paper.

3. Take it slow and easy to handle the piles of paper. Make a rule that you'll handle each piece of paper one time and one time only. Pick up a piece of paper, do what you need to do to it, and file it where it needs to be or dispose of it if you are done with it. One of the biggest reasons we end up with so many piles is that we don't address each piece of paper. Rather we pile them up to be dealt with later. If you aren't working under tight deadlines, do whatever you need to do to each piece of paper when you first touch it. It'll take you the same amount of time to do it later. So, do it now and get it out of the way.

4. Sort through your supplies and make sure you need all of them. As writers, we love office supply stores. As a consequence, we often find that we've accumulated lots of supplies we don't really need. Those you don't need, put up for sale in a yard sale or give away. No need to take up valuable space with items you don't need.

Now that you've emptied, sorted and cleaned your office, adopt a new plan to keep up with the clutter in the future. You might find increased productivity in an organized office. Try it, you just might like it.

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