Office Desk Hacks

Make your desk work harder for you with these ingenious ways of organising your workspace.

You can really be inventive with these desk hacks – and people will admire your handiwork too.

Use bulldog clips

For a cable tidy, attach one to the side of your desk and simply run your cable through its levers, or along the inside of the clip itself. Or wrap your earbuds around it. Or attach it to the wall of your cubicle and hang your bigger headphones on it. Or if you remove the levers from the clip itself, you can use them as a makeshift replacement for your keyboard’s stand. So many choices…

Broken brooms and empty jam jars

If your office broom has seen better days, snap off the handle and use the head on your desk – but not for sweeping. Turn it upside down and the bristles make a nifty pen holder. And if you’ve got spare jam jars in the office kitchen, you can attach the lids to the bottom of shelves, or your desk, and then screw the jars up and into them for clever and quirky storage.

Organise your real life desktop according to item usage

We’ve written a lot about this before on the blog; in kitchens they call it mise en place. It means putting everything that you need for the day, and items you use the most, within arms’ reach, so you’ve got easy access and you don’t need to bend or strain for them. If you keep thinking ‘Where did I put my…’ then you know the my in question has to be front and centre of your desk. If the boss asks why the stress ball is centre stage, that’s because…

Decorate your desk with personal items

Researchers have found letting people decorate their desks with personal items might be good for productivity at work. I think this is both about having an environment that feels like their own personal space, plus knowing the business is giving them freedom. Just keep things tasteful and classy; if you’re going to have pictures of kittens, they have to be in top hat and tails.

Green means go

Pot plants in offices might be good for businesses, say psychologists. Putting plants into previously large and bare offices saw an increase in productivity of up to 15%. Of course, this is about an office-wide policy of having lots of flora, but make a start by putting some greenery on your own desk. Just remember to water it and talk to it. If you talk loudly and often enough, you might actually affect how it grows. Really.

Choose your level of mess

A study found that if you’re in a detail-oriented job, then having a clean and clear desk helps you follow rules and pay attention. However, if you’re in a role that requires creativity, or brainstorming ideas, then having a messy and muddled desk can actually help with those tasks. (Or maybe your office could have a messy-room where people retreat to be creative.)

Clean your keyboard with a sticky note

If a colleague borrowed your computer cleaning kit, you can still give your keyboard a once over with a Post-it note. Simply fold the gummed side over itself and run it between the keys. It won’t get the deepest, crumbiest bits in they keyboard, but it will make it presentable again.

Get hooked on hooks

Over-the-door coat hooks are great for hanging over the cubicle walls that surround your desk. Now you can hang more cables, any wirebound notebooks you have and possibly* lever arch files – using the finger-hold meant to help pull them from shelves. You could even hang your coat on them. *I’ve never tried this, so do a test-run first with an empty file.