When you work from home for a period of time, more and more things will accumulate around you.
Your papers stack up and become disorganized, your “work desk” becomes crowded, and your drawers become your personal landfill.
Organizing the home office is something many people tend to put off, but the best time to get organized is right now.
Here are three easy ways to ensure you’ll never hunt for important documents ever again.
1. Label Your Files Correctly
If your filing “system” looks more like a stack of random papers that have been shoved into a box on your desk, it’s time to fix that problem once and for all.
Instead of rifling through the entire pile every time you need to find an important document, rather sort the papers into categories and put them into files. It seems like a no-brainer, but you won’t believe how much time it will save.
Start by sorting your documents into a few broad categories – you can try “finances,” “personal,” etc. Get different colored folders to make an easy visual distinction between categories, and label each file accordingly. I like to use a label printer to print labels –that way, all the labels will be uniform and easy to read.
2. Throw Items Away
Now that the hard work of getting your filing in order is out of the way, let’s move on to something a bit easier so you don’t lose motivation.
Although there are probably a lot of things you can throw away on your desk, pick three items and throw them in the trash.
Think carefully about what really needs to be on your desk and what doesn’t – for instance, do you really need that old pen that doesn’t work? And what about those old hard candies?
If you have no use for it, toss it.
And you don’t have to stick to just three items, either. Chances are that many things on your desk are just collecting dust and using up space. You can even employ Marie Kondo’s famous philosophy: pick an item up and think about it. If it doesn’t “spark joy,” throw it away.
3. Purge Your Drawers
It’s an ironic fact that desk draws usually become a place to store clutter when their purpose is to organize a space more efficiently.
Everything you don’t have space for on your desk and items that are meant to be thrown out all seem to make their way into a desk drawer – and we tend to just slam it shut and forget about them. Imagine all the storage space you’d have in your drawers if they were cleared out?
Now is the time to tackle this problem once and for all. Choose the most cluttered drawer in your desk and remove everything that you haven’t used or looked at in the last seven months. Don’t go too crazy, though – you do need to keep your business records from the last six years for tax purposes.
You can take the drawer purge to another level by buying a file box that you can store all the documents you need to keep but don’t need quick access to. Take this box away from your home office space and put it in storage
