How You Can Save Space in Your Office

For many people, working in a cramped, cluttered, and unorganized space can bring about a feeling or being overwhelmed, unprepared, and even anxious.

Get Rid of Paper

As offices and modern businesses continue on the path of investing in technological prowess and streamlining business practices, the elimination of paper – both as a capital cost and storage of bills, statements and paperwork – can be attained. These days, paper isn’t a requirement of many offices and businesses. Nearly everything can be stored and backed-up on hard drives and company servers, so why burden your office with entire rooms dedicated to filing, paper storage, and printing facilities. The ease and simplicity of a small paperless office will add to the agility of the entire workspace.

Toss Out the Big Desk

Everything in modern offices is becoming smaller and more efficient in nature. The idea of needing a big corner office to accommodate an oversized power desk is outdated. A small workstation and that hosts your computer, a few odds and ends, and maybe a drawer or two is all you need.

Eliminating the girth of an oversized desk for a smaller workstation – or even a standing desk – is a great way to reduce the footprint of your office real estate, and free up some valuable room to create additional space for common areas, collaborative workspaces or board offices.

Reduce the Clutter

This goes without saying. Ditch the massive filing cabinet after organizing and actually filing your paperwork. Organize yourself by defining your small office space, rather than turning it into a tiny shrine of your workplace identity. De-cluttering your office space helps to convey a sense of purpose, and stimulates targeted ideas and motivation through displayed thinking. These little trinkets and bric-a-brac translate into distraction and crowd your space – so do without them.

Organize yourself an in and out inbox for necessary paperwork, and rid yourself of the pile of papers taking up half of your desk already. With this space, organize a calendar, or notepad for ongoing creative thoughts that help you to prioritize your schedule. Put your pens, staplers, and other office supplies in a desk drawer – there’s little need to display them all day when you make only use them a few times per week.

Tame Those Cables

Cable clutter looks awful – even when you’ve got that big oversized desk to accommodate the mess. Therefore, tangled and wild cables look even worse in a small office space. They make it difficult to lay things flat, take up more room than you may think, and their sometimes delicate operation means that if you push them out of the way, you could lose printing abilities, internet connection, or lose your phone charger for hours on end. Such a simple fix of decluttering these cords, or organizing them into larger bundles makes them more user-friendly and helps inspire additional organization.

There are a plethora of ways to organize and bunch together important cables, wires, and cords that you use and rely on every day, from homemade remedies like socks with the toes cut out of them, to velcro straps, to eyehooks and binder clip solutions – good old fashioned electrical or masking tape, and zip-ties work well too.

Lighting

To reduce the consumption of precious floor space in small office spaces, eliminate the standing lamps and bulky desk lights that you may currently have. The use of overhead lighting can be upgraded beyond the traditional fluorescent lighting of offices of olde, by using LED spots or recessed LED lighting that eliminate shadows.

Good lighting and access to large windows that let ample natural light in not only encourages motivation and happiness in employees, but also helps to create a space that feels larger and less cramped than a room with small windows, or no windows at all.

Think Vertically

Make the best of all of your unused wall space in a small cramped office by investing in tasteful, postmodern wall units that give your space a library style of organization. Attachable shelves for storage, and even cork or magnetic boards sometimes come with these items to further organize the struggling paperwork that is difficult to organize. These units can even house your computer monitor, giving you more desk real estate in the long run.

Wall hooks are good alternatives to coat hooks that take up valuable floor space – and don’t discount the use of a desk with additional shelving above it, if drilling into a wall is out of the question.