Home Office Organization
Piles of paper everywhere. Crumpled receipts, undeposited checks, lunch menus of yesteryear among the shelves. Drawers reveal a chaotic mess of business cards, loose coins, and randomly scribbled notes. Unopened mail in envelopes and some still in boxes. Does this sound familiar? This makes for a good combination of tension and stress just by staring at it, doesn’t it? If your home office looks similar to this, you’re not alone. We all have busy lives and things are just swept aside for other priorities that beckon us. But no worries, because we’re going to give you the organizational steps to create a much better home office that can serve you, when and where you need it. Let’s get started!
Purge and Edit Down
Since we’re dealing with a home office, more than likely it’s the excess paperwork we need to sift through to see if we still need to keep it. It’s a task of time and diligence, but decreasing this amount of “stuff” will always help with the organization and functionality of your office space. Be mindful of every single piece of paper. The more things you have, the more you have to manage and keep track of, which will require more time, more energy, and more money. In the end, everything you own will own you right back, so make sure it’s worth all the effort to hold onto them.
To help you with this task, consider the following when contemplating each piece of paper in your hand: What can be trashed? Does it have sensitive personal information that would be better shredded? Is there any incoming mail or paperwork that can be transitioned to electronic delivery? What can be stored or scanned electronically? Are you keeping the paperwork because it is important and irreplaceable? Really think about what needs to be saved or let go.
Helpful Tip!
From my experience of handling large amounts of paperwork, it really helps to have a system ready before you start. Get boxes, bins, or containers to hold all the papers you are about to separate into categories. This helps because different stacks of paperwork may eventually slip into each other as you perform the purge, or someone may open the door or window and a gust of wind may blow the paperwork together. You may be interrupted by the doorbell, and when you come back, the family pet may have trampled over it, inconveniently mixing it back up. We want you to complete this task one time and one time only! Label them so you know what they are, whether for trash, shred, conversion to electronic delivery, scan, or keep. Working this way, you will have effectively edited your paperwork and efficiently contained it for its final destination.
2. Manage the Flow of Items Coming In and Going Out
Be ready to tackle those papers at your earliest convenience, if not immediately. Things that can be taken care of in under five minutes should be done then (a bill, an RSVP, or school paperwork for children). When finished with a piece of paperwork, discard it right away. If not, paperwork will pile up and eventually grow so large it will become a daunting disorganized mess that no one wants to handle. Be vigilant of piles of paperwork accumulating throughout the house and eliminate it. Designate one collection spot for this pile.
3. Create a Short-Term Filing System
This system should keep things that can be dealt with on a weekly basis. There should be a few, broad categories, such as one for house, school, and each member of the family. One of our favorite products to use for this task is a clear acrylic bin which can hold hanging files. Its form supports files securely so paperwork doesn’t fall out, it’s easy to see what files you have since it’s clear, and the small size (14” x 7” x 10”) sets a limit on what you can fit in it, compelling you to become a minimalist paperwork task master.
4. Create a Long-Term Filing System
This system should hold official documents and special mementos, like car titles, marriage licenses, passports, and birth certificates. The frequency to which you’ll need to access this information will likely be seldom, so this system should be stored high up on a shelf and away from the prime real estate of your desk.
5. Weekly Reset
Once a week go through your paperwork, open up any mail that hasn’t been opened, any piles that may have accumulated, deal with anything that needs attention, shred, scan, and discard. This reset should take minutes, not hours. This is the most important step you should routinely practice to keep paperwork manageable in your home office.
6. Give Everything a Home
Use a shelf with cubbies, drawer organizers, or a simple file system so you can easily store similar things together. Utilize baskets that match the aesthetics of your home so it’s not only a functional system, but an aesthetically pleasing one as well! Don’t forget to label so everyone knows where to find things and more importantly, where to put things away.
7. Make It Fun
Make your home office appealing so you would want to be there while working. It’s worthwhile to spruce up the monochromatic, hard-angled look. Be playful and creative by rainbowing your books. Add a splash of color and lush texture with a plant. Simple rearrangements or additions like these should readily elevate your mood and ease your mind. This is all for your benefit, because a space that makes you happy will increase your productivity and decrease your stress!
Home offices exist because we need them to be places where we can use our time, energy, and attention effectively. In order to make that happen, we must get rid of the things we don’t need, keep paperwork to a minimum so we can able be to handle it periodically, entrust in temporary and permanent filing systems to help manage those weekly resets from origin to destination, use appropriately positioned organizational containers to give everything on your desk and in your drawers a proper place, and lastly, make it look inviting so that when you walk into your home office, you can sit down, take a breath, and get ready to seize the day.