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.