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A cluttered desk is directly proportional to a cluttered mind and an unproductive day at the office. Think of all the times you reached a creative threshold but couldn’t seem to think further because of the lack of focus. What can be the reason if it’s happening too often lately? Can it be your chaotic desk?
The last thing you need while working your brain is a messy space and distractions. Pens, charger, earphones, and papers scattered here and there are all obstacles to your work. Then comes the issue of not being able to find important documents if all your stuff is cluttered on your small desk.
But it’s not a hopeless situation—a few quick fixes and additions to your space coupled with a neat organization can help you declutter your small desk and make it look spacious.
You just need to find out the right ways to add more storage to your office desk. In this article, we have rounded up 27 unique ways to increase your desk space and declutter it without spending a big fortune.
27 Best Desk Organization Ideas Ever To Tame The Clutter
1. Make An Organizer Out Of Mini Loaf Pans
If your desk’s shape doesn’t allow you to have different compartments for your pens, clip holders, pen drives, and stuff, here is a cheap and effective hack for you. You can keep everything separately using a few loaf pans.
They will help you keep all your belongings in separate compartments which make them easier to find and saves crucial time. Similarly, you can use cereal boxes to keep your desk space decluttered and your mind focused.
2. Cork Board DIY Desk Organizer
Here is a quick DIY project that would not only keep your office essentials and memo in place but also let you display them aesthetically. You won’t require any nails or hammers and it would take just about an hour to craft this one.
The board has a pinboard to post your reminders and appointments in place. You can put all the products that you frequently require on the front rack. Overall, it will make your office look clean and tidy.
3. DIY Floating Corner Shelves For Office Desk
Your job may require you to keep a lot of things near your office desk. At the same time, it will be impossible to stay focused if you have all your files, reports, computer, cables, hard drives, and more all the time in front of you. This is especially true if you work in a home office where there’s already so much distraction.
Think of using the wall space above the desk instead. You can put up your stationery, files, and computer accessories in a neat manner. You can also make your office look exquisite if you put a few frames, calendars, and other items there.
4. Pegboard Desk Organizer
If you have a job that requires you to have both your phone and laptop on, here is a quick hack that can help you organize these neatly. This pegboard desk organizer would help keep your hands free by keeping your phone right in front of you.
You can also keep your notes and pens and more organized here. Your appointments and daily reminders would be right in front of you in an organized fashion on this pegboard. It’s inexpensive, easy to make, and is highly customizable too. You can choose the pegboard of your preferred size or cut one to suit your desk.
5. Use Magazine Files
Do you always struggle to segregate the files, the magazines, and catalogs on your office desk? It can be very challenging to organize all these on a single desk. Get rid of the piles of magazines and books and instead place a few magazine files to make everything well-organized and easy to spot.
This customization adds an instant change to your mood by transforming a dull desk.
6. Craft A DIY Diagonal Drawer Organiser To Increase Space
If your drawer is always stuffed and cluttered, it becomes difficult to find items quickly. But drawers aren’t something you can increase in size—or so it seemed so far. This exciting diagonal-partitioned drawer tutorial will change your beliefs once and for all. You will be able to keep your stuff separate and store more in the same drawer now. Moreover, as it’s easy to make, this is what you should do this weekend!
7. Use Wall Files To Organize Bills And Paperwork
Having office wall pockets is a great idea to organize your invoices, cheques, and bills until you permanently file them. Just hang a few wall pockets in front of your desk and label them properly to ensure that you don’t lose your essential invoices again. You can customize these according to your office decor to make them blend in effortlessly.
8. Place A Desk Side Cart For Additional Items
If you are a notebook and diary addict like me, you might be struggling to find a way to place them around your desk. Instead of cluttering your desk with notebooks and diaries and making it look like a mess, you can place a cheap and mobile cart on its side. Choose a tiered one so that you can keep adding stuff like staplers, water bottles, magazines, and more.
9. Compact Mesh Desk Organizer
If you have a constricted desk that only allows a few items like a laptop and a printer, it is not possible to have separate holders for different stationery. Instead of keeping all your eggs in a single basket, you can buy this inexpensive and super useful mesh organizer that would help you keep paper clips, scissors, pens, sticky notes, tapes, and more in different compartments.
It will fit right in a corner of your shelf no matter how little space you have. You can also keep your charger and cables in a compartment here.
Buy a compact mesh desk organizer.
10. Charging Dock Desk Organizer
Does your work involve having to use various devices like iPhones, tablets, and more? Or do you have to keep the phones of all your employees in one place to avoid distractions? Whatever be your need, this charging dock organizer is a must-have in every office.
You can keep all your devices charged at a single charging station. It’s compact and saves a lot of space. It also hides your charging cables for a decluttered and neat look.
11. Mesh Desk Organizer For Artists And Illustrators
Artists and illustrators need to have a lot of differently sized pens, sketch pens, paintbrushes, colors, clips, tapes, and whatnot. And you always tend to lose one or the other thing while working. It won’t happen anymore if you have such a desk organizer—it provides you with ample space to keep all your stationery in different compartments. And don’t forget to place everything back after use.
12. Adjustable Desk Organizer For Bookworms
If your work involves a lot of reading, you’d probably have a lot of books to keep around your desk. You’d also require to have these at an arm’s length for a quick reference. Having a mini bookcase on your shelf like this one can help keep all your favorite books handy. The adjustable bookcase is built in two pieces—you can expand and contract it the way it suits your desk and needs. It is simple yet so effective for all the book lovers out there.
13. Portable Desk Organizer Caddy
If your work requires a lot of shifting to different spaces, you might require to take your tools and stuff with you wherever you go. Having your stuff packed in a portable caddy can make the shifting task much easier. It’s transparent and is divided into compartments for proper organization. The hinged lids close quite tight and you can also stack several of these to expand the storage space.
14. Desk Riser
The monitor usually takes most of the space on compact desks and it becomes a big challenge to accommodate other essential stuff. You can now maximize your desk space using a sleek and effective desk riser. It has just enough space to keep your monitor, and then some more.
In this way, you can keep your magazines, stationery, files, and more under the monitor easily. The minimal desk riser also fits in effortlessly on any office desk.
15. Gold Storage Baskets Under The Shelf
If you have a little drawer or space under your desk, you can place these exquisite golden storage baskets under them to keep your essential documents separate and organized. That will save you from all the mess that is created due to the piling up of papers and project files. You can always add other less important or less used stuff in these to declutter your desk.
16. BambuMate Desktop Shelf Display Rack
If a full monitor riser isn’t suitable for your desk, you can add a display rack to use up a bit of space in front of the desktop. This display tray provides a similar type of storage space without blocking your view in front of the desktop. It is probably one of the best places to keep your pocket diary, pen, sticky notes, pen drive, keys, and other stuff. Your keyboard can also slide in neatly at the end of the day to avoid dust.
17. Put Your Regularly Used Stuff Near Your Dominant Hand
It’s essential to have all the stuff you frequently need near your dominant hand. If your job requires you to be on the phone all the time and your phone is kept near your less dominant hand, it will naturally become time-consuming and tiring.
You should consider re-orienting your desk to keep your most-used stuff near your dominant hand to save time and hassle. It’s wise to shift your printer and other less-used stuff towards the other side to make space for your phone, stationery, and more.
18. Complete Pegboard Backdrop For Mixed Supplies
A decluttered office isn’t just about organized accessories. Having a few decor items that balance the overall feel of the display are very essential to make it a productive space.
But before adding your houseplants and frames, add a few wire racks, shelves, and cup holders to ensure that the pegboard can carry most of your supplies. You should pay special attention to the spacing in this one to ensure it doesn’t look chaotic.
19. Shift Accessories To One Side
Lamps, stationery mugs, flower pots and so are some of the most common items every office desk has—this always leads to overcrowding. You can build a wrap-around standing desk and keep it in the corner of the room so that you will have enough space to keep all the things you need. This way, the majority of the room will be left uncluttered too.
20. Make Your Paper Clutter Look Like a Part of the Decor
You might not notice this but old postcards, notes, and stuff create a lot of mess and clutter. They look disgusting on the shelf and can easily get lost during a cleanup too. But you can blend them into your decor by pasting these on the wall beside an aesthetic artwork to bring in a balance. It’s also an effective way to remember your appointments, plans, and other essential stuff.
21. Create A Keyboard Tray
With the rise in the use of laptops, modern offices don’t always have keyboard trays on office desks anymore. But these slide-in trays can be so useful even if you don’t have a keyboard. You can easily slip in your hard drives, notebooks, reference material, and even the laptop safely when not in use. It helps prevent damage too.
If you do not want to spend a substantial fortune on it, you can use this super quick tutorial to create a tray yourself! It costs much lesser than the market price and isn’t that challenging to make either.
22. Use A Hanging Closet Organizer
If you have too much stuff to accommodate on a compact desk, try using the vertical space too. You can hang a hanging closet organizer as shown in the post. If you have a rolling cart around, you can hang it on that, or even on a door.
It provides an instant storage space out of thin air and doesn’t cost much either. You can also buy clear hanging organizers to ensure you can grab the stuff you want quickly. It won’t take much space like a bookcase but gets the job done. It also has different compartments,
23. Add A Pullout Shelf In Your Cabinet For The Printer
Printers are extremely useful but bulky accessories you need on your desk. It’s hard to accommodate your printer if you have a compact space.
Instead, try to put it in the cabinet. To make it easier to pull out and push in now and then, you can add a pullout shelf to the bottom cabinet. That sounds like a hack not many would think of but this can really get your desk sorted.
24. Use Magnetic Strips For Metal Tools
Magnetic strips offer an extremely useful way to store your regularly-used metal items like metal rulers, staplers, scissors, paper clips, and so on. This way, your desk will be clutter-free and you can get any tool you want in an instant. It’s also easy to put things back.
25. Add Elastic To A Pegboard To Create A Flat Bookshelf
Instead of limiting your pegboard to tools and accessories, you can tie an elastic across the ends of a pegboard to create an instant, flat, and viewable bookshelf for your reference books and guides. It’s one of the most cost-effective alternatives to a bookshelf and saves you a ton of space too as the pegboard is totally flat.
26. Use A Cable Box To Manage Cords
Yes, no office desk works without cords. Imagine all the cords from the CPU, Printer, screen, speakers, and more all tangled up. Ugh. It all looks so chaotic and messy while it also increases the chance of cable damage.
A simple and inexpensive accessory like this cable box can change the game though. You can now store all excess cords hidden under the desk. It’s a compact product and can fit in small corners or pockets of your desk.
Buy this wire organizing cable box.
27. Lean A Tall Organizer If You Can’t Mount One
This storage solution will help declutter your desk and also display your items in an organized manner. Create a tall organizer with an abundance of pockets like this one and lean it on the wall beside your desktop.
Try adding as many as compartments as you can. You can choose to buy such an organizer easily but there’s also an option to save costs and craft it by following this quick tutorial.
Read all the methods carefully and adopt the ones that suit your office. You should also realize that you’d need to change your approach a bit, and actively try to keep things that you use back in their places. Try that for a month and you’ll be able to see the differences in terms of productivity too.
Make sure that you always have a bit of negative space as well as decor items to prevent the space from looking dull and unproductive. But other than that, adopt any of these methods and achieve your dream of having a clutter-free workspace.