It’s a nice feeling after you’ve invested time and money to buy office and computer desks online and arranged them into a new working office space. The desks are prepared and the room is looking brand-new, brimming with potential productive energy. As soon as the desks become occupied, however, they’re going to get all dirtied up and messy.
Whether you’re running an office or are an office worker with your own desk. What can you do to make sure that your desk is clean? Here are some tips to get you started:
Tip 1: Disinfect Your Desk Regularly
It might be hard to believe, but it has been shown before that the average office desk contains more bacteria and other germs than the average toilet seat. A more horrifying way of putting it accurately is to point out that it’s not just a little bit more dirty, but 400 times more contaminated with germs than the average toilet seat.
Where are all these germs and this grime coming from? Well, think about what a desk endures each day. First of all, it has human hands over it for the entire day. What’s more, if you ever sneeze around your desk, remnants of that sneeze likely make it to your desk. If you eat lunch at your desk, then food particles and other bits get left behind. You’re breathing all over your desk all the time. Your hands move from a dirty keyboard, to some paper, to the drawer, to the stapler…and thus the contamination spreads.
Therefore, taking time to wipe down your desk, clean your keyboard, and disinfect as much of the desk as possible at least once a month, then that’s going to be a big help. You can also reduce the impact your hands have on the desk environment by regularly washing and sanitising your hands.
Tip 2: Declutter the Desk Regularly
It’s not just germs that are filling up your desk, but visible clutter. Some people engage in a year-long battle for space on their desks, piling up papers and stationery items more and more until finally it can’t handle any more and the office finally has a spring cleaning event to get desks more organised. You can make it easier on yourself if you take perhaps 10 minutes out of each day to organise your desk. Even if you only organise a single corner or a single drawer, the fact that you do it every day will mean that the desk stays in good order for longer.
Tip 3: Boost Your Storage Capacity
Going for under-desk storage in the form of drawers and cabinets is a great way to keep the surface free from clutter. This is useful for those whose desk clutter is not entirely useless, but still taking up valuable real estate. Organizing things into drawers and cabinets is a good way to effectively store documents and other things for future use, and at the same time freeing up space on the desk surface to make it easier to work and easier to clean and disinfect.
Tip 4: Keep a Stash of Cleaning Supplies at Your Desk
Your office might have a cleaning crew that comes in and does a basic wipe down and clean of the desks and other surfaces in the office. If you have enhanced and beefed up your storage as we mentioned in Tip 3, then why not make a little corner in one storage area for some simple cleaning supplies.
Most cleaning crews only do a perfunctory wipe to make things appear clean and tidy. They will likely also empty your trash can. If you have a few supplies of your own, you can do a quick clean each day and make it really count.
