Office Essentials

Stay on schedule

No matter how good your memory is, the best way to keep track of your meetings and deadlines is to write these details down – and there plenty of options to choose from.

If you want to keep the information with you at all times, a diary is the way to go. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes and designs, from simple black books to those with colourful covers. Plus, they incorporate plenty of room to write down the details of every appointment and event going on in both your professional and personal life.

Calendars are also useful for planning your time, whether you want a day-by-day desk calendar or one that you can hang on the side of your cubical and view a whole week, month or year at a time.

For project management, a planner might be a better choice. Depending on your needs, these can be large, wall-mounted options that can be written on with dry-erase markers to provide a large-scale visualisation of the task, while smaller items are also available. In either case, they will often include space for information like short-term deadlines, long-term objectives, budgets, resources and other vital details.

Hold it all together

From preparing reports to filing, organising paperwork and simply making sure everything for a particular project is kept together, there are plenty of times when we need a fastener of some type.

Glue is a good choice if you're pasting documents together or assembling a display board for a presentation. Alternatively, a bit of sticky tape to hang up a sign – or possibly some balloons to celebrate an employee's birthday – can always come in handy.

Paperclips and pins are ideal for keeping documents in the right order. You could even do a bit of colour coding, with plastic paperclips available in various shades.

Staplers and staples are a more permanent alternative to paperclips. Meanwhile, hole punchers will allow you to place documents neatly in a ring binder.

Make a note of it

Whether you need to remind yourself of an important task to do later in the day, or you need to flag up an error or important point in a report or document, repositional notes and sticky index tabs can be very useful to have around.

Post-it notes are manufactured by 3M and come in a range of lovely colours, from the classic pastel yellow, to fluorescent pinks, blues and greens, which will help ensure they're noticed. Alternatively, you can opt for lesser-known brands, which are available in a range of sizes and money-saving multipacks.

Snip snip snip

Trimmers, guillotines and scissors are also useful to have around the office. Paper trimmers and guillotines make it easy to cut large stacks of paper to uniform sizes, while you'll want a pair of scissors for more detailed work.