Resolving to Get Organized? You’ll Need Tools

The new year always feels like a clean slate, with opportunities for advancements of all kinds in the coming months. Now is the time to organize and make your business ready for those opportunities. But as you look around your office and analyze the various areas where organizational improvements are needed, there’s a fundamental question to ask: Do you have the necessary organizational tools?

Marie Kondo, the organizing expert and author of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” counsels her clients to tackle organizational tasks by category rather than physical area. Paper, for example, is a major category for most offices. Financial documents, marketing materials, HR records, client orders, and so on – they seem to accumulate effortlessly while we are focused on other mission-related tasks.

Dividing a mass of paper into a “keep” pile and a “shred” pile seems straightforward, but in fact each document requires a deliberate decision regarding its future. In some cases, an electronic version (scan) of a document can be sufficient for future needs, and the original paper can then be shredded. Other documents should be saved in paper form even if they are also scanned. Office-supply retailer Staples offers a list of documents that businesses should retain, especially notarized documents or papers with original signatures.

The scanning and shredding process will reduce the volume of paper in your office, but even so, your enterprise must hold on to a formidable quantity of paper documents. This is where a high-density mobile shelving system really shines as an organizational tool. Not only do these systems keep papers safe from a variety of hazards, they can actually reduce your office storage footprint by eliminating the fixed aisles between file cabinets. Just by organizing your paper, you can gain extra space for extra productivity in the coming months.

And extra productivity is the reason you wanted to get organized in the first place. A high-density mobile shelving system is well worth a look if you’re looking at ways to get ready for what’s next.