Organizing a Shared Office Space

Our office space is where we get our work done and manage tasks at home or in an office building. If we have a shared office space, it is easy for the area to become chaotic and unorganized. There are ways to make the office space more organized for ourselves - but also the person we may share it with to ensure that everyone has a productive time working.

Define the Borders Between Workspaces

In any shared space, we must try to understand how much space each person has for their workstation. The easiest way to maintain your respective spaces is by using walls or dividers to define where the territory ends and begins. It’s easy for some of our mess and the other person’s mess to become mixed, making it difficult to differentiate whose work is whose. An office partition or even something as small as a binder clip can help you tell where each person’s area ends. It will also help keep the chaos of papers and office supplies in check and contained within their borders. If you have just bought yourself new gel pens, fountain pens, or any other supplies, you want to make sure that they stay on your desk and not with someone else.

Designate Drawers and Organizers

There isn’t always much room when sharing an office space with someone, so we may need to share resources for storage, such as filing cabinets or file organizers. Properly labeling the drawers or shared bins that both people use will make organizing the shared office space easier. You may have shared work with the person you sit close to, so if you have a three-drawer cabinet, that third drawer can be for shared projects.

Labeling items is an essential element of organizing. When labeling your office supplies, use these best practices to label network cables, and use a similar organizational system to label folders and other materials. When we label our supplies, we know what belongs to us and to someone else. It also makes it easier to return any out-of-place materials to their owner’s respective drawer or shelf.

Consider What Can Become Digital

Thanks to the vast and strange world of technology, we can convert paper documents into digital files. Taking paper documents and scanning them to become PDFs or transcribing them makes it easier for us to maintain shared office space.

Having fewer physical materials means less clutter, making it easier for your space and work neighbors to organize your space. Both spaces will look cleaner and more organized with most of the information loaded onto computers.

It’s important to keep our workspaces organized, especially when sharing them with someone else. The organization is considerate of their time and needs as well as our own. These tips will help you find a nice equilibrium of sharing the space and help both parties be productive throughout the workday.