Five Tips to get Your Home Office Organized

With more and more of the work force working from home these day there are tons more home offices across the country. Some companies are actually encouraging people to work from home. It saves on commuting time and costs but if you are not organized you can actually be less productive than if you were still working at the office. You owe it to yourself and your employer to be as productive as possible.

Separate personal from business

We don’t all have the luxury of having a separate office for professional use and another for personal or family use so let’s assume you have one office for both. The most important thing to do is not to mix business with pleasure.

Have a separate filing cabinet or at the very least separate drawers for your business and personal files. Never the twain shall meet as the saying goes. You are going to lose a lot of productive time trying to sort through files that contain both.

Finesse your filing

Keep your filing separate as well. Throwing both your business and your personal files into the same basket for filing away later is dooming you to working on both at the same time or having to needlessly go through and put aside files you don’t need to touch at all. Better yet, get into the habit of filing documents away as soon as you are finished with them.

Corral the cables

How many times have you got your feet tangled in a mess of wires under your desk? Take the time to ensure that your wires are connected correctly and that they are run under the baseboards or held together with zip ties or similar for a neat appearance and to ensure that no wire accidentally gets pulled out of place right in the middle of that long report – that didn’t get saved!

Necessary tools

Make sure you have all the tools you need at your disposal – waste basket, recycling box, in box for mail, out box for documents needing to be mailed or couriered to the office, etc. Most people need a shredder these days to protect both your personal information as well as the company’s. Hey, if you work from home at a company’s request will they reimburse you for all or part of these expenses?

Clean controls clutter

Keep a clean desk. This is very important as a lot of time is wasted each morning in just getting organized to start the day. You would be surprised to track the number of hours we waste in just “preparing” for the day.

If you share a home office with other family members who use it for school, games or whatever, ensure that whoever uses it leaves it the same way they found it. The last thing you need to do when you are under the gun for a deadline is to stop to clean up someone elses’ mess.

Follow these simple tips and you will have a much more productive day. If you need some professional help getting your office organized, contact us here.