5 Steps to an Organized Home Office

No matter what you use your home office for, one thing always remains the same.  It’s hard to concentrate and get quality work done if your space is a cluttered mess. But don’t worry.  In this post I’ll share 5 simple steps to help you organize your home office and make sure that it stays clutter free.

Remove Everything

An effective way to start the organization process is to first remove everything off your desk (other than your computer, monitor, and heavier items like a printer) and to lay everything out in piles on the floor. You should also do the same with your desk drawers, cabinets, and shelves.  Now is also the perfect time to properly dust, clean, and wax all surfaces.

Group Like Things Together

Once you’ve removed everything from your desk, drawers, cabinets, and shelves, begin to group like things together: books with books, bills with bills, office supplies with office supplies – you get the idea. Not only will this help you figure out how much space each category of items requires, but it will also help you sort though duplicate or outdated materials that you’ve accumulated over time.

Prioritize

At this point you should have gotten rid of any items that you don’t need. Now you can start moving all of your essential items back to your desk, shelves, cabinets, and drawers. Your desktop should have as little on it as possible – otherwise it will look cluttered and will leave you with inadequate space to work. Make sure to give everything a specific place so that you can always find it easily. Place all of your frequently used items in easy to reach areas and stow away items that are not used frequently in less accessible areas.

Go Paperless

One of the best ways to prevent clutter and piles of paper is to opt for the “paperless” option when it comes to your credit card statements, cell phone bills, and so on. Remember, you can always print out any essential items. Worried that you’ll miss a payment if you don’t get your statement in the mail? You can set up automatic payments. Consider using a cloud service such as Evernote or Dropbox to organize your documents.  I’ve written about Evernote before, you can read some great ways to organize using Evernote here.  Once you go paperless, you won’t ever want to go back!

Set Aside 10 Minutes to Clean

Congrats, your home office is now clean and organized! The goal is to keep it that way, right? To do that, try setting aside ten minutes at the end of each day to tidy up your space and get ready for the next day. This isn’t the easiest habit to form, but believe me; this pays off in the long run!

If you follow these 5 easy steps, you should be well on your way to getting your home office organized, and more importantly, keeping it organized. And to make the process more fun, take a look at my previous blog post, 3 Free Applications that Make Organizing and Cleaning Fun. Let me know in the comments below if you found these 5 steps helpful or if you have any questions you can contact me here!