A home office, whether it’s an entire room or a corner of your kitchen, is more than just an office – it’s the command center of your home and life, and maybe even business. It might be home base for everything from bill paying to party planning to conference calls and more. And whether you’re working on weeding out an existing home office or you’re starting from scratch, you want to make sure you use the right space and set it up for success. Here are a few keys to success when setting up or re-inventing your home office.
- Define your space. First, you need to define and dedicate some space for your office. This may be dictated by what space you have available – it could be small, such as a mobile filing cart or you might have a whole room to work with. Whatever the case, don’t fight natural tendencies – try to set up your office where mail, paperwork and other important items already tend to accumulate.
- Create a job description for your office. Take a few minutes to list out what functions your office needs to support. Having this list will make it much easier to figure out what you need in the space and what you don’t.
- Corral your supplies. Knowing what you are trying to accomplish in your office will help you corral the supplies you need – think supplies for opening and processing mail and school papers, paying bills, making new files, and anything else you need to routinely do in your home office.
- Kick-start with a quick sort. If you’re dealing with a big paper mess, such as piles all over your desk, it can help to kick-start your process with a quick sort. First, gather all your surface paperwork into a box (or boxes). Then do a quick sort by looking at each paper and sorting it into 1 of 3 categories – To Do, To File, or To Toss. Your Toss pile might be a mix of things that can be recycled and things that should be shredded. Once you have tossed your Toss pile, you’ll just be left with 2 piles – papers you want to keep but don’t need to take action on, and those that require some sort of action. This quick sort strategy allows you to start taking action on top priority paperwork, as you work on setting up an improved filing system without worrying that pressing action items are buried in a pile somewhere.
- Stay on top of incoming paperwork. Last but not least, it can help to start practicing a simple paper processing system for incoming paperwork as you work to weed through older files and set up your new office. This might look like:
- Taking time to go through mail and incoming paperwork every day
- Immediately tossing trash and recycling
- Taking action right away on quick “one-minute” items
- Corralling follow up items with a set of action files
- Scheduling regular time to take action on those items – be sure to put this on your calendar and practice, practice, practice until it becomes habit.
Whether you’ve got a small office mess, a big office mess, or no office at all yet, follow these steps and you’ll be well on your way to a functional home office!
Want to learn more about home office organizing? Check out Down to Business: Make Your Home Office Work for You, available on our Learn to Organize e-Courses page.
