Organization
Organizing your Home Office
By: Kelly Goldthorpe
If you’re running a business from home or telecommuting, than having a clean and well organized office is imperative. Being cluttered or having a messy space makes it impossible to work efficiently or effectively. Keeping your in-home office organized involves your files, workspace, voicemails, and everything in between.
Paper Management:
You lay your mail down on Monday, then Tuesday you add some receipts, Thursday you pile on some files, and by Saturday the stack has grown and spread all over your desk. This is a situation many find themselves in, which can be easily taken care of with day-to-day management. First sort through all the piles you’ve developed into categories like: bills, cards, receipts, messages, etc. Either put all these into binders or use binder clips to keep them all together. This is the divide and conquer method! By clearing up the mess you’re more likely to respond to individual concerns, especially when you can find them!
For bills, use an accordion style folder with one slot for each month. There are also devices available where you can have a spot for each day of the month for very specific deadlines. For other files you don’t need a bulky, black file cabinet. There are trendy file totes available which don’t take up much space and add color to your space.
Once you have organized where these items should go, keep up on it. Make a rule where once you grab something you either throw it away or file it. Leaving it on your desk may seem like you’ll get to it, but instead you’re just junking up your free space.
Workspace Makeovers:
All those stray paper clips, the random stapler, and pens scattered about really crowd your work area. By tidying up all the odds and ends around your home office you can make a more peaceful place that you don’t spend your time pushing things aside.
To begin, start from the top and work your way down. What knick knacks are hogging up space on your shelves? Do they need to be there? Now consider your desktop. Put those pens and pencils either in your drawers or in a pen holder. Keep your desktop as minimalistic as possible. That way you don’t feel overwhelmed when sitting down. As for your drawers, they often become an area where you just shove all those miscellaneous items that you want to keep but don’t know where they belong. Open up those drawers and start sorting through them. Set limits – like only 5 pens, pencils, and rubber bands in the drawer at a time.
Voicemails:
Voice messages are one of those things that take so long to access, listen to, and respond to sometimes it’s just easier to let them pile up and call the person back instead. Especially in an office situation you want to review messages as soon as possible. This will prevent them from accumulating and causing you to listen to ten at a time. Listen to the message, write down the pertinent information, and then delete it. Address the concerns as soon as possible.
If you really hate listening to voicemails, there are services which translate voice to text, but they are often unreliable and may not provide the entire message.
Clutter Control:
Don’t let it get out of hand. Work on keeping up with daily organization. Keep your home office an office and instruct your family members to avoid being in it. If they start looking for things it can quickly cause your office to fall into chaos again.
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Secret Hide-a-Ways for Home Office Clutter
By: Kelly Goldthorpe
Let’s face it, sometimes you’ve just got clutter you can’t get rid of. It can’t be thrown away for some reason or another, sentimental or practical, but it doesn’t see a lot of daily use. You don’t want to take up valuable home office space but it still has to be handy. Here are some suggestions for home office organizers.
Your home office storage closet is a great way to stash a bundle of files. If you converted an extra bedroom into your home office it likely has a closet with a few shelves. Clear some space for miscellaneous items. Make sure you keep these files organized so it’s not just a pile of junk, but store them up and out of site. You probably think this goes against all organizing advice you’ve ever heard, but you can’t always eliminate all clutter. Give yourself a break and acknowledge that you’re going to have some loose paper hanging around. The space beneath your stairs will also make for a great home office storage closet. That area typically sees even less use than a regular closet, keeping items more out of the way.
Another place to hide your files is online! That’s right, just scan them in. By making digital copies of your work you can actually eliminate the paper aspect. There are programs online that will store your files, just in case your computer crashes. This is an alternative to an external hard drive. If you want to keep the hardcopies you can put them in a small storage unit.
Home office supplies can also get in the way. An unconventional hiding place for these supplies is the linen closet. In homes where the linen closet isn’t full the homeowners don’t think to store anything else in it, putting items in the garage or kitchen. Check to see if your linen closet has space that isn’t being utilized.
Think about underused aspects of your home. These are all potential storage places. You want to keep your files and belongings well organized, but if you have limited space for your home office think of creative storage solutions.
