How to Organize Your Home Office

Beginning Strategies for an Organized Home Office: Tips and tricks to clearing out that clutter!

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Filing cabinet
• Notebooks/Folders
• Marker for labeling
• Calender
• Index cards
• Cork-board
• Trash bag

1. LOCATION: Your desk should be your main piece of furniture, with computer and printer. This should be central to everything else. Take a look at the location of your most crucial items in your office. What do you use most, and how do you best use the space you have for those items?

2. RESOURCES: Keep a filing cabinet beside your desk, where you store important papers and information you will need quick and easy access to when doing online accounts, forms, and taxes. Do you have paper clutter all over your desk and work space? This is the perfect solution to going through and weeding out anything you don’t need or can throw away. What is important, file away.

3. BOOKSHELVES: While your best source for research material can be online, we all have our collection of books we like to keep nearby. Sort through those piles of books and decide on the top three or five that you use more often than all the others. Keep these on a desk shelf. Place the others on a bookshelf, someplace easily accessible, but out of the way.

4. PENS AND PENCILS: Take your collection of mismatched pens, pencils, markers, and erasers. Do they all work? Throw away those that don’t. Do the erasers smudge? Throw them away. Keep a small container or mug on your desk of the pens, pencils and erasers you most use.

5. SCHEDULE: Keep a calender on your wall, right beside your central workspace, where all you have to do is glance over to see what you have to do. Use different colored pens for each of your schedules; i.e. work schedule, home schedule, events-out-of-the-home schedule. Keep a dry-erase board or cork-board beside this to tag notes, invites, phone-numbers, etc.

6. INDEX CARDS: Index cards are your best friend. They can be used for practically anything. Ideas, favorite quotes, timelines for book writing, to do lists, etc. Post them on your wall with your calender. When you are done, throw them away.

7. FOLDERS: Not only can you use a filing cabinet, but pocket-folders are great organizers, as well. For book writers, use a new folder for each book you are writing. Any scraps of paper or notes that are associated with that book, place in that folder. This goes for anything, not just book writing. Planning a friend’s baby shower? A vacation? Keep everything in a folder and label it.

Tips & Warnings

• Whatever goes in the office has a place. If you can’t find a place, then maybe it doesn’t belong in your work space at all. Take it out.
• Depending on the work you do, tweak the structure to accommodate your own needs. Maybe your office doesn’t include a computer at all, but is used rather for scrap-booking. Then your scrap-booking table would be central, instead of your desk and your filing cabinet might be drawers for all your supplies.

[cjwritelife]

on 4/13/2008 Oh ... and I love the cork board idea. Especially since I am a writer. I need a place to put notes and visuals.

[cjwritelife]

on 4/13/2008 Great article! I am working on a work area now. This will help me be organized from the very beginning.