Short-term and long-term strategies for maintaining your space.

Take a moment to look around your desk. How much of the clutter piling up is related to tasks you completed hours, days, or weeks ago? You’ve already set up an organizing system; now you need to maintain it to ensure that it works for you. Here are two strategies—one short-term, one long-term—to help you accomplish that.

Short-Term: Small Messes are Easier than Big Messes. Set aside fifteen minutes at the end of each day to clean up that day’s worth of new clutter. Don’t wait until the end of the week, when you’ll be faced with a bigger mess that will take more time—maybe even hours. It’s much easier to carve out an extra five, ten, or fifteen minutes to clean up rather than hours. If you stay on top of your systems by doing a little bit at a time, it will be much easier for you to maintain it.

Long-Term: Prune Your Workspace. Every six months, take a couple of hours and go through everything in your storage system, on your desk, and around your workspace. Weed through everything as if you’ve never done it before. If there are things that you haven’t seen or used in the previous six months, it might be worth re-evaluating whether they are worth keeping. If you maintain a schedule of evaluating your things every six months, your office will stay clutter free.