Offices are inherently untidy - well the majority of the ones I have seen are at least! Looking around at my desk 5 years ago I remember there being post it notes, news papers, un paid bills, invoices and so much more just lying about collecting dust and not being actioned. As I mentioned that was 5 years ago, and a lot has changed since then! My office these days is one which has a lot of paper organisational structure and I am able to sort everything out in a really short time frame (something that 5 years ago took me hours, and hours and hours!).

Should you office organisational skills not quite be up to the bar (like mine used to be!) I would recommend having a flick over my top five useful tips for keeping the paperwork tidy in your office. If you can master these then you're well on your way to organising your offices paperwork system!

1. Utilise the recycling and shredding facilities, shred old sensitive documents and recycle the by product along with any non-sensitive documents. Recycling is good for the environment and ones corporate responsibility and shredding is a unusually satisfying experience, I hope you might agree.

2. Make piles: to shred and recycle and to keep, keep piles contain anything of great importance which needs to be kept for a given amount of time and the other pile is obvious.

3. Use the Internet - get online banking and online accounts. Doing things online will save you a whole load of paper and clear up the office a treat. The less paper the better I think - with banks you can always print a statement off when you actually need it, rather than loosing it and being charged for another or any other similar scenario.

4. Printing of e-mails - Stop printing out every email you receive, after all your inbox is not going anywhere, is it? This is great practice for environmental responsibilities and shows that your thinking about the environment actively, lets not forget the cost savings and reduction in paperwork's if everyone stopped printing out their emails.

5. Digital backup all of your historic documents to a hard drive or other suitable storage solution, after a number of years some documents can be simply scanned and disposed of. This makes room for the new paperwork to be filed away neatly and means you have a backup should you ever actually need to produce it. Not every document is one that you can keep a digital copy of for example you need to keep your driving licence and certificates, the originals need to be kept, for old compliments slips and things like that you see.