Thursday, September 29, 2011

Cleaning out your office

I said I was going to write a book about how to leave your office when you leave a job, but not sure I would have enough material.  Of course if I told all the horror stories of all my past move in's to new offices, I could fill many pages. These tips are in no particular order, but all are necessary and important, no joking.
-All personal items should be removed.  Not sure what I mean by personal, try this, anything you use to groom yourself or that you would not share with others need to go.
-Books that belong to you, especially any with notes and/or answers in them that you would not want anyone else to read or take out of context.
-Take all the pictures, presents, cute sticky notes on your computer and either toss them or take them. 
- Go through your paper files and purge extra copies; old, outdated handouts; anything that was typed or printed on a dot matrix printer; fax receipts; if you want to be really nice put the items in the file in date order, newest on top. Take with you anything pertaining to you personally such as employment records, pension and health benefit info.
-Go through computer files and delete personal folders, document drafts, old letters and memos that are useless.  I like to organize things by year and then put items in the year file once the year is over.  This way there is a record of what was done.  I did not need to keep all the versions of a doc or publication, so I keep only a final copy.
-Make a folder of current open projects and give it to your boss. Also give him/her a list of passwords for work related websites.  I was responsible for quite a few and whoever takes over my job will need to access the same info.
-Cancel and/or turn in any company credit cards, keys and email accounts.
-Throw away junk! It isn't fair to expect the new person to clean up after you. 
-Return borrowed items to rightful owners.
-Leave new contact info for yourself.
- When you leave your office, let it be as blank a slate as possible so the next person can make it her/his own.
-Don't take things which don't belong to you! If you bought things with company money so you could do your job, they belong to the company, not you. 
So, now you have done all of this and are ready to go.  You show up at your new office and much to your surprise you find....
    EXACTLY, someone who thought cleaning out her office meant taking her purse with her when she left for the last time!

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