Home Office Organization Tips

These home office organization tips ensure that you remain productive, focused, and get things done. There are big benefits in working from home.

About 20% of the workforce spends some time working from home or outside of the office - and this figure is predicted to rise!

Technology is making it easier to telecommute and work from home.

But working from home blurs the boundaries between work and home so it is important to get your home office organization right!

The right home office design is important to reduce distractions, manage workspace limitations, and get things done.

These easy steps for home organization boost your productivity at home.

Organize home office space

An organizing tip that many professional organizers suggest is that your office has to have a home for everything and to put everything in its home.

Do you have a place for everything?

Are there piles of paper building up in the corner or CDs balancing on top of books?

Take an objective look at your home office design.

Whether your home office is on the kitchen table or a whole room, there are some essentials that you need to have for your home office.

Your home office space most likely contains a computer, files, and a desk.

However, the daily bombardment of information means you need to develop a system for managing paper clutter.

If your desk is cluttered with faxes, reports, and pieces of paper, it can be distracting and reduce productivity.

A disorganized desk may not reflect a cluttered mind!

But pecking at multiple documents that clutter your desk is not effective. It is usually better to focus on your top priority until completed.

Managing your paper clutter makes or breaks an organized home.

Not managing paper clutter effectively at home is a quick way to frustrate your family as papers move from the office to the dining room table.

Another advantage of a clean desk is that you reduce your search time. On average people spend 15-45 minutes a day looking for documents they already in their hard or soft files, or email Inbox.

This translates into 2-6 weeks per year of lost productivity.

I talk more about how to organize your desk to maintain and manage paper overload.

How to organize your files for home office organization

Working from home also makes it difficult to organize your filing system.

When working from home you really want the right information when you need it!

But working from home limits your space - you may have files in your garage or scattered across various rooms.

It is important to bring your files to a centralized location.

Organizing tip: Your home office is running a business and the files of your business should be separate to your personal files.

If you have your working files in the garage and a laptop set up in your home office, you may want to consider moving your working files closer to your computer.

An executive I once worked with had her working files (files that needed to be accessed several times a day) at the other end of the room. Each time she got up to access a file, it took her about 30 seconds.

She did this about 10 times a day - about 6 minutes in lost productivity.

This may not sound like much but over a year this added up to almost 25 hours of walking back-and-forth across her office.

The point I am trying to make is to have your working files within arms' reach.

At work you may have to file according to the rules of the office. At home you are the boss!

Find out what works for you.

To help with this, ask yourself "How would you find that file or that business proposal that I was writing last week?" Answering this helps identify a filing system that could work for you.

I talk more about how to organize files to ensure that you have the right information under your nose when you need it.

How to organize your computer for the home office

Many of the people I have worked with in developing effective home office organization systems use their home office computer also as the personal computer.

Do you use your office computer as a personal computer?

Do other family members use the home office computer?

If so, then you may benefit from:

• creating a separate file for your work documents
• developing a separate user account and login for your work.

  You can password protect this from others who may accidentally change or delete important files.

Develop good home office organization habits

Maintain a schedule. Working from home blurs the boundaries between work and leisure.

Probably one of the biggest problems for the home office worker is distractions - kids running around, chores to be done, and friends coming over.

This makes it difficult to set and stick to a schedule.

Similarly, work begins to pervade at all hours if strict boundaries are not adhered to.

To maintain a healthy work-life balance it is important that you develop a schedule and build a structure around it.

I find it helpful to write my work times in 2 hour blocks in my time management planner, others schedule a 9-5 work day.

My concentration is best in the morning, so I schedule my most important work to be done then.

Find out what works for you.

Re-file at the end of the day. You can make or break home office organization by the manner in which you manage paper clutter.

At the end of the day re-file the loose papers and clear your desk.

Leaving work with a clear desk means you don't have a mountain of paper waiting for you the next morning.

Having a clean desk to start your workday does wonders for your stress and productivity levels, and is a good strategy for overcoming procrastination.

Manage email. Home office organization is not just about managing your hard files. It is also about managing your soft files and the countless emails.

On average, research shows that we spend over 2 hours reading and replying to emails.

This means that email has the potential to dwarf all other forms of communication and it is essential to keep you emails in good order.

Find a system that works for you - this may be to create folders by client or project.

See these tips on email etiquette to stay on top of your Inbox.

Related articles on organizing tips

Clutter Control: Organize Clutter and Reduce Stress

Organize Garage: How to Organize Your Garage

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