I totally missed National Clean Off Your Desk Day this past Monday, a holiday I didn’t know existed until today. Then again, I didn’t know that National Regifting Day existed until last month either. Anyway, I was doing some research for future blog postings, and came to discover that the second Monday is January is this desk-cleaning holiday. As one who is constantly battling clutter on her desktop, I try to make every day clean-off-my-desk day, but that doesn’t always happen. (Don’t worry, that’s not me in the picture above. I’m not that bad.)

However, when my MacBook got sick last week, I needed to find space on my desk to set up a temporary desktop computer with a monitor. And that meant that I needed to clean off a good portion of my desk. In order to keep my desk neat and tidy (which I’ve managed to do for the past week), I needed to have some tools available that would prevent the clutter from accumulating in the first place.

For starters I needed a recycling bin. Crazy as it sounds I haven’t had a recycling bin in my office for at least a year. That’s because about a year ago I started bringing my own bags with me when I grocery shopped, meaning I no longer brought home brown paper bags from the store. And those brown paper bags were my go-to recycling bin.

Brown paper bags were so easy to use for collecting paper recycling. I just kept one under my desk and dropped paper into it as necessary. Then when a brown bag got full, I’d walk it outside to the recycling bin we keep outdoors, then come back in, grab another brown paper bag and start the process all over again.

I’d been putting off recycling mounds and mounds of paper on my desk, because–duh–I had no place to put the paper. Sure, I could have walked it outside like I did with those full brown paper bags, but that just didn’t happen. So an easy fix to the recyclable clutter on my desktop was to find a makeshift recycling bin I could use. I grabbed a milk carton from the basement, slid it in under my desk next to the trash can, and within about an hour, nearly all of the paper on my desk that could be recycled was recycled.

The other tool I needed near my desk to help clear it off was my shredder. Since I tended to open the mail while sitting at my desk, I would always put aside credit-card offers or any other papers that could potentially contribute to identity theft, with the notion that I should shred them. Well, instead of waiting for that one day when I would feel inspired to go on a shredding binge–and in the meantime watched my “to be shredded” pile grow taller and taller, I placed a shredder under my desk near the recycling bin. Then, I started shredding like a skateboarder looking to do some damage on the pavement.

Once I had those two tools in place, it was easy to keep a lot of the clutter off my desk. As soon as I opened the mail, I shredded anything sensitive and recycled whatever couldn’t be reused. Here are additional ways to keep clutter off your desk from Ask An Organizer.

Which brings me to another point when it comes to cleaning off your desk. As you go through stuff, it’s great to be able to recycle items, but it’s even better to keep them out of the waste stream–and save yourself some bucks from having to buy new–by reusing whatever you can.

So when I came across manila envelopes that the school had used to send home communications, I stacked them in my filing cabinet drawer where I keep office supplies, with the idea I would reuse them the next time I needed to mail something. (Of course, I would cover up the original return address, postage and whatnot. Hey, that’s what peel-off blank mailing labels are for.)

I’m already pretty good at taking paper that I’ve used to print something out on, turning it over and putting it back in the printer so I can reuse the other side. But these days I’ll do the same with printed material that comes home from school or handouts I might get at an event. If it’s got a clean side of paper, into the printer it goes.

Here are some additional tips on how to reduce, reuse and recycle paper from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. These tips are designed for National Clean Off Your Desk Day but they’re really applicable for any day of the year.

How do you keep your desktop neat and tidy and/or reduce, reuse and recycle when cleaning off your desk?