5 Ways To Organize Your Home Office By Monday

Your bedroom is where you sleep, and your kitchen is where you eat, but your home office may be the nerve center of your entire house. If you own a home-based business, this is where you keep your files, communicate with your manager or clients, and keep track of your bookkeeping. Even if you don’t work a 9-to-5 job out of your home office, it’s where you manage your household’s most important financial, medical and educational documents.

No matter your office’s official use, you can’t get much done in there if it’s a cluttered mess. Unless you’re cleaning your desk, clearing the floor and weeding through your filing system with some regularity, you could find yourself lost in a tangle of wires and buried in piles of papers.

Not sure where to begin? Clean the clutter in your office with these quick tricks.

Your Desk

If you’re having trouble finding your desk underneath the piles of files, papers, and to-do lists, set some time in your day to reorganize the papers into three divisions: action, file, and trash. And, don’t be afraid to put things in the trash pile. If a news article has been sitting on your desk for the last month, chances are you’re not going to read it, so muster up the courage to throw it away.
After you’ve organized everything into piles, quickly dump the trash pile and don’t look back.
You may not be able to get everything taken care of in a short amount of time, but organizing the information into manageable piles will help you clearly see your next step and get you on the road to a mess free desk that glistens with the victory of organization and productivity.

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Your Desk Drawers

A graveyard of half-used pens, business cards, lost paper clips, and uneaten breakfast bars, there’s no telling what clutter monsters are lurking in your desk. Brave the dust bunnies and ink spills and eliminate as much of the trash as possible. Add business cards you find there to the contact information on your computer, and throw away the physical card. Toss out used pens, and keep only three or four pens with caps in your drawer. And, using desk organizers is a great way to get organized and keep your drawers spic and span.
When you’re busy managing employees and leading your team, it’s easy to overlook the daily task of organization. But, clutter and disorder can wreck havoc on clear thinking and productivity. So, when you’re ready to spring clean, try these tricks to get your space in shape for a refreshing and energizing environment that promotes efficiency and serenity. Since most of your time is spent at the office, decluttering your workspace is well worth the effort.

Get An Organizational System In Place

Before you clean a single thing off your desk or floor, remember that you need somewhere to put all that stuff — and some rational system for organizing everything. Chances are if you need to organize your home office in the first place, you’re working in a state of partial or total clutter right now.
You can use a variety of tools to organize your office, including:
An inbox you can use to put assignments, bills, letters and other projects on your to-do list. Remember that this isn’t a permanent storage container: If a piece of paper has been sitting in your inbox for more than a couple of days, you need to either file it or trash it. While you’re at it, you might want to add an outbox to handle paperwork that’s finished but still needs to be filed.
A file rack to hold current projects
A trash basket, recycling container and shredder
A filing cabinet
Next, establish a workflow. When a project comes in, you might start by putting it in your inbox. Within a day or two, it can move to your file rack of open projects. After the project is finished, it goes into the filing cabinet. After a couple of years (depending on your business and how long you’re required to keep documentation), it should move to its final resting place — the recycling bin.

Interior Design Your Filing Cabinet

Investing in a filing cabinet is a great way to free up space in your home office. Buying a fireproof cabinet that also locks helps ensure that your important documents won’t get stolen or destroyed. A locked, fireproof container is essential for really important documents, like birth certificates, marriage certificates, passport and car titles. You could also keep them in your bank’s safety deposit box.
To maximize storage space, buy a four-drawer filing cabinet. Make sure your chosen filing cabinet is sturdy: You don’t want it to break or fall over onto your foot.

Toss It

One of the reasons why home offices get so cluttered is that their owners either stubbornly refuse or don’t take the time to throw things away. Take a few minutes to purge your office of everything you’re no longer using.
Here are some things you need to toss:
• Pens that no longer work
• Paper clips that are bent out of shape
• Old magazines and newspapers
• Unused or broken office equipment, including old phones, computers, and printers/scanners (you can recycle many of these products)
• Outdated documents