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Working from your home office can be super comfortable or messy as hell, depending on if you have an organized home office or not. With your office being cluttered with a myriad of things like scanners, printing machines, book makers equipment, etc., all in one place, you would not be able to focus on your work and in turn, this will decrease your productivity as well.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a huge office space or a tiny bedroom-sized office. If it’s messy, then you’ll keep getting frustrated with it.
This article lists out 6 basic tips that are easily manageable and can make your office organized.
- Choose any 5 things in front of you that you haven’t used in your office for a long time and stack them out separately. Then continue to do this until you have taken all the things that you haven’t used in a long time. This is the easiest and most simple tip for organizing your office as it doesn’t seem like a big daunting task.
After separating the things that you haven’t used go through each of them and categorize them into groups like trash (which can include magazines, newspapers, old pens that don’t work, etc.), papers for shredding (like important office documents or transactions that you don’t want people to see), filing in a binder file or taking an action file, etc.
- After going through all the places, it’s time to organize your home office desk now. You can do this by clearing everything from your desk except for necessary things and things you cannot work without. Put all the other stuff in cardboard boxes. And put them somewhere near your desk where it is accessible and not too near that you trip over those boxes.
Then go through 3 things from your cardboard boxes every day and analyze what you have to do with them. For example, if it is an important paper, you should put it in an appropriate binder, or if it is something less important like an old magazine, you should probably throw it out in the trash.
Within a week or two you’ll have your cardboard boxes sorted out and you’ll be able to enjoy a decluttered desk as well.
- Divide your home office into separate places like working space, snacking space, relaxing area, etc. This will help you put things into places where they should belong, and you will avoid cluttering your space again. You can also splurge on drawer organizers, or you can put things into separate containers.
For example, all the writing tools like pens, pencils, markers in one container, all the stickies into a different one, all the budgeting tools like calculator, calendar into a different container so on and forth.
- After putting your important papers into binders, label them into different categories like a medical binder, pet binder, House binder, Transactional binder, Personal binder, etc. You can also put labels on your drawers, boxes to recognize them easily and make your day less frustrating.
- Create a mailing system for all the mail that come into your office so that they don’t lie around on your desk again. You can go through the mail once a week or twice a month and see if they are important to you or not. If they aren’t, make sure you throw them out or else your mailing system will get cluttered eventually.
- Make use of the wall space by hanging whiteboards, calendars, etc. You can also put shelves if you have things to keep, but you don’t have enough space.
These are some quick tips for organizing your office. You can use all of these to get started with your home office organization process. Also, remember that you can do the first tip if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of this, which will give you a great quick start. You can do all the other things slowly at your own pace.
You may also like: Decluttering Ideas for Your Home Office
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