Getting organized at work is truly a great way to start the New Year. You can purge files, e-mails and those articles you intended to read but are now completely out of date and irrelevant. But if your office looks like a tornado swept through in 2010, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Your best bet is simply to take it one step at a time. Chances are you can’t devote an entire day or two to cleaning and organizing (you do have work to do after all), so break the task into several pieces to tackle over the course of a week or two. Maybe you clean out one file drawer each day for a week. The following week you work on weeding through 10 old e-mails first thing in the morning.

Finally, when you’re finished and your office looks like something out of a magazine, work on developing some good habits to keep it that way. Resolve to devote the last 10 minutes of each workday to tidying up your desk, filing and filtering out some e-mails.

By the end of year, you’ll be so organized your co-workers won’t recognize you! Let’s hear your best organizational tips. Did you resolve to be more organized in 2011?

But, if you’ve neglected your cubicle or office throughout 2009, the task may seem a little daunting. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

• It would be great to spend the entire day organizing, but you probably have actual work to accomplish, so just pick one task for each day during the first week or two of January. One day, it might be a desk drawer, the next day it’s a stack of file folders. Take little bites and before you know it, you’ll see the top of your desk again.
• Use your desk trays as more than just a paper-dumping ground. Label one “Must Do This Week” and label another one “Must Do This Month.” You’ll have a starting point for your workday and make it easy to prioritize.
• Thanks to e-mail, we don’t receive as much paper mail or faxes these days, but if you don’t deal with them immediately, they can pile up. Go through your mail daily, recycling what you don’t need and finding a home for the other pieces. Also, make sure to cancel any magazines, catalogs, etc. you don’t want.
• Label your files, trays or drawers. This makes it much easier to quickly clean up – don’t spend five minutes trying to figure out where that annual report went.
• Keep it clean. Take the last 10-15 minutes of your workday to clean up your office space. File or recycle papers. Put away extra pens, notepads or your stapler.

Two popular time organization books out right now are “The 4-Hour Workweek” and “Getting Things Done,” both of which subscribe to a particular organization system. Have you read either of these books or tried either system? Or have you found your own system that works for you?