5 Worst Mistakes People Make in Office Cleaning

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It’s the end of another term, and you know what that means: organizing, cleaning, and simply preparing for the next term. If your goal is to clean out your school and office, you would want to consider these mistakes so you can avoid them in the future!

1. Cleaning without a strategy.

You would agree if you hear a plan that involves organizing and cleaning. To many, overemphasizing a goal in cleaning or office organization might be a little to romantic or vague to count as an actual plan.

Before you lead your team’s cleanout and organizational plan this end of term, start establishing little goals for yourself. You may want to re-organize your files or create a priority structure on your mail’s inbox, or even both!

Applying the SMART principle would guarantee manageable and tangible outcomes that will make the whole process cleaning smoother. 

2. Not Finishing the ‘Plan’.

Have you ever started a project and when you get just about halfway through, you get distracted, side-tracked and you eventually get convinced that you’ve done it to say halfway is good enough? We have all been there and you are falling into the trap!

On the other side, it only means that you’ll have more things to organize next end of term. Calling it done at the halfway mark could mean that you are leaving sensitive information vulnerable to others and to a potential misuse.

3. Overlooking electronic organization.

Papers, files, cardboards and other waste are easy to spot, but don’t forget to allot time and resources to sort your electronic files as well. Cleaning up electronically would mean freeing up hard disk space, backing up the data and deleting unused accounts.

4. The 'shred-happy' person.

It’s exciting and intimidating to be assigned with several year’s worth of files to simply get rid of everything.

Hold it! Please do yourself a favor and really take time to sort through the documents. You don’t want to make assumptions about which ones to keep or send for shredding. Once those have been shredded, not even superman can get it back.

5. Not shredding enough.

There is another side of being a shred happy person, which is, the ‘Don’t shred it!’ colleague.

Whether your plan is to clean out home, school or office documents, dedicate your time to search and eliminate confidential information that is not worthy of keeping. If you’re not sure and when in doubt, sort it to shred!

Ready for a clean out?

Where documents are sensitive we provide collection, destruction and recycling services. Simply click the button below to learn more: