4 Top Tips for Organizing Your Home Office
Working at home requires you to be disciplined and organized. This is why it is important to have many ways to ensure that you stay organized and your paperwork are neatly arranged. Where you are unable to do this, your ability to put out real work and use your time effectively becomes compromised.
Here are some tips that will help you to keep your home office efficiently organized and functional:
- Eliminate paper piles on your work desk and about your office
It is easy to let documents and all kinds of paperwork just heap around your home office. You can get rid of this by ensuring that every piece of paper in your home office is shredded, filed or acted upon. Important documents worth filing should be kept binders and kept in your filing system. Everything paper should be off your desk and you should have just your computer and phone on the desk or anything you are currently working in. Get rid of post
- Have a color-coded filing system
Organizing your filing system is a great way to ensure that you have an efficient working area. Make use of a different color for each category of paperwork. For example, green for financial documents, red for medical documents and blue for your home documents. Documents in each category can be arranged neatly in a binder and organized using clear binder pockets.
- Store documents in binders before filing
Binders are a great way to store documents in your home office and are a significant upgrade from using file folders. They are flexible to store in shelves or drawers. They aren’t expensive and go a long way in keeping your home office documents safe and organized. You can use clear binder pockets to make your binders even more efficient. Ensure you have a three-hole punch, page dividers, page protectors, clear binder pockets, spine labels and other necessary accessories to organize your documents into binders for proper filing.
- Avoid cable clutter
Reduce the number of cables that are tangled around in your work area to avoid trip hazards and electrical issues. You can go wireless with as many electronics as possible such as your printer, keyboard or mouse. Invest in a USB hub so that you can use just a single USB cable to connect many devices to your computer. Cables should also be bound together using clamps, Velcro wraps or cable ties to ensure everything stays where it should and preferably out of sight. Desk holes also allow you to pass cables away from the desk and against the wall where they cannot cause trip hazards.
- Always have a handy supply of accessories
There are many little things that make a world of difference in ensuring that your home office is well-organized. Having them close reduces the amount of time you waste getting up to look for them or grab them from a drawer. These include pens, pencils, rubber bands, paper clips, sticky notes, tape etc. Have small containers on your desk to hold these or a tray. You can also have clear binder pockets handy so that once you are filing paperwork, you have everything you need which reduces procrastination.
- Conclusion
A clean, clutter-free is enhances productivity and keeps you working with minimal distractions and maximum efficiency. Keep all your important documents organized with these tricks and you’d be surprised at how much more work you’d get done.