It's a simple fact: Clutter represents postponed decisions. Many business owners and managers have cluttered offices—unless they have an organized assistant. If you don't believe it, just start looking around your own organization.

Entrepreneurs and many managers are big-picture thinkers, and following through on details can be a struggle. They like to start things, but finishing them doesn't happen easily. Often the more brilliant a person is, the messier their office is. For them, sorting and filing seems like a lower priority than creating a new product or serving your customer. But is it?

In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we look at the correlation between leadership and clutter.

In 2010, an office products company, Brother International, conducted a study to quantify the cost of messy desks and the time spent looking for misplaced items. They estimated the impact to corporate America is about $177 billion annually. That price tag figured in the time spent daily to hunt for misplaced files, staples or documents and added up to 76 hours, or nearly two work weeks, a year. The same study showed clutter and disorganization are also taking a toll on our wallets, since nearly one-third of those surveyed failed to get reimbursed for a business or travel expense because they misplaced or lost a receipt.

So what can you do if getting organized doesn't come naturally to you? Half of any job is using the right tool. Here are six tools you can use to eliminate the clutter in your office, accomplish your work and enjoy your life:

1. In/Out/File: Place three containers on your desk within reach of your chair.

  • One for items you have not yet looked at.

  • One for items you need to take somewhere else—another person's office, the post office, etc.

  • One for items you need to file in a location within your own office that you can't reach from your chair.

2. Wastebasket/Recycle/Shred: Make it easy to get rid of what you don't need. For example, if you have a shredder, but you can't reach it from your chair, use a desk drawer or a small box under your desk to hold items until you can shred them.

3. Calendar: Papers that serve as reminders to do something are some of the biggest contributors to a messy desk.. Keeping an open calendar, paper or electronic, on your desk for making direct entries can help eliminate this issue. While most of us are great at making appointments with other people, we're not so good at making appointments with ourselves to better manage our time and take care of personal needs. We need to care for ourselves in order to meet the needs of others.

4. Contact management system: Another big source of office clutter is paper (and electronic files) containing contact information—names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, etc. Be sure you are using an efficient contact management system to collect, store and effectively maintain all client contact information and keep it consistently up to date.

5. Action Files: These files should be located close to your desk. They contain the papers you need to work on your current projects. They can be sorted in different ways:

  • By date (files labeled 1-31 for the current month, and Jan-Dec)

  • By type of action (e.g., "Data Entry" "Expense Reimbursement," "Waiting for Response")

  • By name of project, client or event

6. Reference Files: These files contain papers you may not need on a daily basis, but don't want to throw away. They can be located within or outside your office. Your "To File" box will serve as a place to hold the papers that need to be filed.

Set aside four hours in the next week for the decluttering process. Clear all papers and files off of your desk and put them in a box. Then begin going through them based on these six steps. Then make the Magic 6 on ongoing process to stop future clutter, and provide a system for every new piece of paper that finds its way into your office.

If this article would be helpful to your clients, click the ClientSafe button below to share it with them.

Source: Barbara Hemphill, founder of Productive Environment Institute, in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a nationally recognized speaker and author of Less Clutter More Life. As one of the country's leading productivity and organizational experts, she has helped many corporations, such as Staples, Hallmark and 3M increase their productivity and efficiency.

Compiled by Cassandra Johnson