How to stay organized at work

Some people never had to learn how to stay organized at work, it just seems to come naturally, but to others it’s a skill that needs to be honed and kept sharp, not just on a personal level but on an organizational level as well.

And it’s definitely worth it to learn how to stay organized at work. People who are organized are less likely to miss deadlines, rarely report feelings of stress, and generally perform better in their day-to-day job. And organizations who are, collectively, more organized generally perform better.

5 tips on how to stay organized at work

On a personal level, being organized means that you know what’s on your list of tasks, which order your deadlines will appear in, you know where to find the tools and information to do your job, and you know how to get the most out of your time.

If you want to learn how to stay organized at work with multiple projects we’ve got 5 tips for you.

1. Track your tasks in one place

The more brain capacity you need to spend mentally tracking tasks, the less capacity you’ll have for other things—like completing those tasks. So, the best tip we can give you is to make better to-do lists.

Even if you want to learn how to stay organized at work with multiple projects and collaborating with multiple teams, gathering all your to-dos in a single task management tool is one of the best ways to start getting organized at work.

2. Learn to manage your time

There are a lot of different ways to manage your time when you want to learn how to stay organized at work. And finding out which is the best way for you may require a little bit of trial and error.

Among the different techniques you can try out are:

• Time blocking: Which is when you schedule everything from meetings, tasks, lunch breaks and quiet time in your calendar. That way you will know exactly what you are doing at any one time.
• Timeboxing: Which is when you set a timeframe for each one of your tasks, and then work to finish the task within the given time frame. This ensures you don’t spend more time than necessary on a task.
• Eat the frog: As Mark Twain famously wrote, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning.” In time management this means that you order your tasks from least enjoyable to most enjoyable in an effort to get you through tasks faster. This technique is often used in sales, where tasks like cold calling are seen as the frog that needs to be eaten. Be aware that this approach isn’t viable for everyone, and many people with ADHD report not being able to “eat the frog”.
• Dopamining: For those who aren’t able to eat the proverbial frog, dopamining may be a solution, as the two are contrasting approaches to productivity and motivation. Where “eat the frog” will have you tackle the hardest, longest, and least enjoyable tasks first, dopamining focuses on tricking the reward system of your brain by completing many small, easy tasks in quick succession to build up dopamine and which sets you up for tackling the bigger tasks.
• The Pomodoro technique: Which is when you break your day into a number of 30 minute blocks. The first 25 minutes of each block is used to focus solely on the task you’ve selected for the block, and the last five is used as a break and to set up for the next task.

3. Learn to practice inbox zero

While inbox zero may sound like you need to completely empty your inbox, the name “inbox zero” is actually a bit misleading, as it is more about organizing your email inbox and reducing clutter, than it is to have zero emails in your inbox.

If you want to practice inbox zero, the best approach is to schedule time either weekly or daily to take care of incoming emails, review your inbox and organize and prioritize the tasks that come from those emails. If you use a task management software to prioritize tasks, you can connect the two processes. 

4. Focus on what’s important and learn to delegate tasks

One of the most important things when it comes to staying organized at work, is knowing what to focus on.

When you begin developing your organizational skills, there’s always the danger of falling into the “list syndrome” which is where you add everything to your to-do list, and see everything on the list as important. And because you have lists upon lists of tasks, it will feel like you are very organized.

But learning to stay organized at work also includes spending your time on things that matter.

A great example of how putting tasks on your to-do list isn’t the same as being organized, is the CEO of a startup, who mops the office floors and changes the lightbulbs herself, because it’s cheaper. 

That CEO may be able to fit those tasks into their calendar, but it also means that she is paying CEO-level salary to the person who changes bulbs and mops floors and worse, she is wasting time handling maintenance instead of driving the business forward.

A simple way to organize your tasks and figure out which tasks to delegate and which to manage yourself, is to use the Eisenhower. Which is where you sort tasks into a graph where one axis defines level of importance and one defines level of urgency.

Tasks that are important as well as urgent need to be carried out immediately and most likely by yourself. Tasks that are important, but not urgent need to be scheduled for a later time. Tasks that are urgent, but not important (such as changing a lightbulb) should be delegated and managed by someone else. And finally, tasks that are neither urgent nor important shouldn’t really be on your mind in the first place.

5. Maintain a healthy work-life balance

The thing most people forget when they try to find out how to stay organized at work, is that while you can implement all the strategies, systems and new approaches you want, if you don’t have time to wind down, you won’t be able to stay organized for very long.

You need rest, you need to relax, and you need time to refocus.

So, the most important thing to do, if you want to stay organized at work, is to make sure that you have time to recoup. Whether you call it a healthy work-life balance, your hobby time, or doom-scrolling on the couch, you need it.