Basic Organization Tips for Your Home Office
Can you relate to this guy? Are you ready to throw in the towel on your office space?
Basic Organization Tips for Your Home Office
By Jessica Nowell, Owner at Time Order Purpose Organizing
These days many of us have “home offices”. Whether you are self-employed, work from home, or bring work home it can be difficult to maintain the beautiful, magazine-worthy office area many of us dream of. If you work from home you have probably also struggled through creating make-shift office space because what is supposed to be your office is unrecognizable. Hopefully, you will find at least one of these tips useful in reclaiming and maintaining the perfect office space for you.
It is super easy to get distracted, discouraged, and even discombobulated by the mess that can happen in our offices. Alternatively, there are some equally easy ways to tame the paper beasts, and create order from chaos.
Here are some of our favorite tips how to organize your home office:
1. Set up sacred office space
2. Keep the most important things handy and within reach
3. Store vertically not horizontally (especially paper!)
4. Create a mail station
1. Scared Space
One of the biggest problems most people face when it comes to their office space is that it is not just their office space. Perhaps it’s the dinner table, a homework station, craft area, mail collector, lunch table, etc. When we have so many things happening in this one place, things get shuffled, moved, tossed around and then we lose things. By training yourself and others to respect this space for its designated purpose we can help minimize the clutter and chaos.
i. There are plenty of small desks, fold down desks, etc that you can utilize to give yourself a designated place in your home just for your work if you are currently using the couch, kitchen table, etc.
2. Keep the most important things handy and within reach
Far too many of us put things on our desks because we think they should be there, but we do not use them frequently enough to warrant them taking up valuable workspace. This especially is the case for things like staplers, paper clips, white out, etc. Many of us like to spread our projects out and we need space for that, without having to do a lot of work to get there. On the opposite end of the spectrum, having too many things on your desk creates a cluttered feeling no matter how nicely they are arranged and can act as a distraction, whether you recognize it or not.
i. The things that should be on top of your desk are things that you use regularly and consistently throughout the day. If it is a once a week, or even once every couple days, it probably does not need to be on the top of the desk.
3. Store vertically not horizontally
This seemingly simple tip is will make a huge impact in the shortest amount of time. By storing vertically we visually eliminate piles. It is easier to thumb through documents then they are vertical than having to sort through a pile – saving up time too! In generally, pulling things out of a vertical pile and replacing them takes much less effort than if they are stacked horizontally. This requires less activation energy for us to put our things away and therefore, piles of things that need to be put away are less likely to happen.
i. When we make a vow to ourselves to ONLY store vertically, we also force ourselves into sorting and taking action with our stuff more regularly because we run out of room to store it.
4. Create a mail system
Mail systems, both for the postal mail and correspondence between people using the space can make a world of difference. Mail is one of those things we often handle far too many times. If we can minimize that number we will save a lot of time and energy. One must recognize however, that they cannot sustain huge changes without a big why. So remember to try and make small changes to what you are currently doing and work your way up to more dramatic changes in how you do things.
i. Our favorite tips: open mail immediately (let go of the envelopes), have a recycle and shredder near where you open mail, and try to go paperless with as many things as possible! Also, create a labeled and divided system for incoming, out-going, and needs action/immediate attention. Be sure to specify what immediate action means for you.
These are some simple and basic tips that anyone can implement in their home office. For additional tips and suggestions please reach out to [email protected] and visit www.toporganizing.com