If you have a home office, or are in an actual office, you likely have a space to keep all of your office supplies. Keeping an office supply closet organized is important to quickly being able to locate what you need.
Depending on the kind of office you work in, you may need to store basic office supplies like paper, notebooks, and writing tools. If you work in a more tech based company you may need to store gear, cables, and other equipment in your storage closet.
If you can never find what you are looking for, it can be frustrating and take time away from you focusing on your work. By keeping your office more organized, you are ensuring that you can find what you need easily and intuitively.
Here are some of the best ways that you can organize your office supply closet to keep it clean.
Vertical Storage Racks
Making use of vertical storage racks is a great way for being able to organize what you have. It is good practice to put the things you use most frequently at eye level. For example, this would include pens, pencils, paper clips, etc. These are the tools that you will likely be using daily in your office.
If you have varying forms of cables, you can store those on lower levels because while you will likely use them at one point or another, you probably will not be using them every day. Storing things like printer paper, may also be good for storing on lower levels of your storage rack.
How you structure your shelves is nearly as important as what you store those items in. People typically do not think about where they are placing items, but it really can make a difference.
Bins
Once you have found a way of organizing your shelves, you can move on to figuring out how you want to store those items. It usually is good to get bins to group varying items together. This helps to make things easier to find and prevents loose items from getting lost.
Group your office supplies in ways that make sense and are intuitive. For example, you probably will not want to store paper clips with your computer cables. This does not make a lot of sense and things would likely get lost easier.
Labeling
In addition to your shelving and bins, you should start to label the bins. This can help you and your co-workers to quickly be able to find what they need without having to open boxes to look. This prevents people from sorting through things and moving things around.
Labels help to give direction and structure your organizational system. You can put the labels on the shelves themselves, but it may be more helpful to label the bins themselves.
Organizational Tools
Figuring out the layout of all of the office supplies you have is the hardest part of organizing your gear. The next important part is figuring out easy and simple ways to keep your organization effective.
Some great tools you can make use of are drawer dividers, folders, pouches, and cable ties. Making use of these can help you to keep your stuff organized and easy to find. For example, with the Velcro cable ties, you can wrap up your various cables or other office supplies and keep them wrapped together. You can even get ones that are color-coded or where you can add labels to help organize even further. While many cable ties can be useful, we recommend Velcro because it is re-usable and long-lasting.
Keeping Your Office Supply Closet Clean
Having a clean office supply closet makes things a lot easier for you during your work week. It can be incredibly irritating to not being able to find what you need. When you are able to organize what you have it can save you time.
With just a little bit of effort you can take what you have and organize it in logical ways that make sense. If you are working in an office with other people you will want to have a system that can be easy to maintain, so that things do not get out of hand.
It is pretty simply to get your office supplies organized in ways that are practical. By making use of bins, labels and other various organizational tools you can make your office supplies easy to locate and can make sure that things are easy to stay organized. This helps with productivity and being able to know where something is when you go to find it.
