Is your office cluttered beyond recognition? If you’re ADD, that’s very likely to be true. Papers may be hanging out of every drawer. Stacks of things may be starting to look like the leaning tower of Pisa. And let’s not even go into the dust on your monitor.

Because of your attention deficit, you may not even notice these things. It’s standard ADD behavior. But the thing is, if you’re working in an office, your boss may look at your mess and think, “Promotion? Probably not.” You don’t want that! You don’t want the people at home stumbling around your home office messes, either, especially if you work from a corner of your bedroom or another room that’s used by others. Take a look around you right now. What do you see?

If your work area is what I described, the first thing is not to be depressed about it. There are simple things you can do to fix monumental messes, and they aren’t painful at all. Think of re-organizing in “chunks,” which are more palatable for your ADD brain.

First, take one spot, like the top of your credenza. Things you haven’t looked at in 7 days and that aren’t important should be tossed. Then, file things that you don’t need all the time. Put a set of colored hanging file folders into your deep desk drawer or your file cabinet, and label them. You’ll probably need the labels at first because your ADD brain won’t remember what color is for what, but after a while, you will remember and the color correlations will make things easier–red for urgent, blue for instructions, whatever.

For things you use all the time, get a 3-inch binder and a set of sheet protectors. Put everything that you use on a regular basis into that and stand it up on your desk or put it nearby where you easily retrieve it. Then, when you need a disk or a sheet of URLs or whatever, it will be close at hand.

Once you have the first drawer or shelf cleaned, stop. Tackle another areas the second day and another the third day and so on, until you’ve finished. In a week to 10 days, your office should be clutter free, providing you didn’t re-clutter the spots you’ve already worked on.

To keep that from happening, set aside a large space for yourself that’s close at hand. You can use a desk drawer, or a basket or bin on top of your credenza. It doesn’t matter. Just be sure that the space is large enough and that you don’t have to get up from your desk chair to use it. Then, during the day, when you don’t know what to do with something, toss it into your “everything” bin and forget it.

At the beginning or at the end of every day, take 5 minutes to sort through your daily pile of stuff. Use the colored file folders and the binder to keep things organized. Keeping this ADD-friendly system going is the key to your ADD-clutter-free success!

ADD-friendly systems are important to you, and they’ll only work if you stick to them. Try this one and see if it doesn’t work well for you.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc and a certified hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner who has helped many clients achieve ADD Success. Get free weekly tips on controlling ADD when you visit Instant ADD Success at http://www.instantaddsuccess.com

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