10 Steps to Home Office Organization
Is your work area swallowing up documents in the sea of paper,
that you call your home office? If so then you need to follow these
10 steps to home office organization, and get back on track to being
productive, and not wasting time hunting down documents that you
may or may not still have.
Step 1 - Pack up your entire office
Pack up your entire office, everything from the drawers in your desk
to everything on top. Leave your filing cabinet alone if you already
have some filing system started. Put it in a big cardboard box or
somewhere away from your office. The point of this is to start with
a clean slate, and later on in the following steps you will unpack
only what is necessary.
Step 2 - Cleaning
All that you have left in the room should be a desk, and any other
office furniture that is emptied of all clutter. Now its time to give
it a full cleaning. Vacuum or mop the floors, dust and polish your
furniture, clean your computer screen, mouse, and keyboard.
Step 3 - Plants
Plants are very important in a work environment. They give us nice
clean fresh air, and add to a very peaceful environment. So get your
self a few house plants for your office. Having windows close to your
desk is a great way to bring some of the outside in. Natural light
is also great for the plants in your office.
Step 4 - Address Book/Day Planner
There are many different approaches to how you can organize your appointments.
You could choose to use a PDA, laptop or maybe a traditional paper
book planner. Take a step back and look at how you track appointments
and how many details you need to save for each one of your contacts,
then decide on the type of day planner you will need.
Step 5 - Unpack Only What you Need
Your probably wondering about the stuff I told you to pack up, well
now its time to unpack. Now that your office is clean, remember to
only unpack the most vital items for your office (you don't want to
ruin your nice productive, clean, and organized office).
Step 6 - What Goes Where?
Sit down in your desk chair and anything that is within arms reach
is considered to be your most valued space. Locate all the items that
you use on a regular basis here.
Step 7 - Pack Away What you Don't Need
Now store all the stuff that you didn't unpack, but store it somewhere
that is accessible to get to, if need be. I'm sure some of it is garbage
try and sort through as much as you can before you pack it away.
Step 8 - Prepare the Office for Incoming Work
Get an in-box and out-box system going, this will help take care of
the flow of paper work. Stationary stores carry great products designed
to sort your mail and documents.
Step 9 - Back up your Work
There are many different options when backing up your work. CD burners
are great for small files, if you work with media you may want to
invest in a DVD burner, and buying web space is a great option most
servers are multi location and save back-ups of you back-ups.
Step 10 - Upgrade for Space
If you find that you are still falling short in space to get work
done. I recommend buying one of those new LCD thin computer monitors.
They have come down a lot in price and are actually replacing the
old CRT (deep style) monitors which are scarce on the store shelves
today.
If you have followed these ten step then you will be sitting in
your nice new clean and refreshing office. Wasn't that fun? all
you have left to do now, in your new home office, is work. Sorry.
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