The Home Office Organization Puzzle: 10 Tips to Help You Focus on Work Rather Than Clutter

(Part I of a two-part series)

Sometimes your home office can make the difference between productivity and wheel-spinning. If you find yourself strumming your fingers more than you’d like, it may be that your office space needs some attention. Here are the first five of ten tips to help you organize your office so that you can focus on your work rather than your work environment.

1. Optimize your work space
You may be wondering if you should have picked the spare room rather than the dark and dingy den to set up shop. If you ’re not working well in your current office you may need to decide whether change is in order. Is there another work space that would be more comfortable? If so, try sitting there for an hour or two with a few files on your lap to see if the new space is more conducive to your work. If the answer if “yes,” then pack up your office and make the move.

If your current space is where you need to be, than ask yourself a few questions. Do you have enough room in your office, and is it being well used? Do you have the equipment you need? Filing cabinets, a desk or two, and garbage bins are a must. Is there too much furniture in your office, making it difficult to move around? You may need to do a little rearranging to make the office more work-friendly.

2. Make sure your furniture arrangement is work-friendly
You ’ve probably watched those home-improvement shows where moving the couch and side table to an unexpected corner open the room and make it more functional. It’s important for your furniture arrangement to facilitate the work you do. Do you need space to sort paperwork? Does that space need to be closer to your computer or your filing cabinets? Would you get more done if you had a filing cabinet right by your desk so you could file paperwork quickly and easily?

Perhaps your furniture is cramped. You may think that the desk can’t go anywhere else. But take a few minutes to consider all your options. Is there another desk in the house that might work better? What if you moved the easy chair out of the office? What if you moved the filing cabinets into the closet? I once worked for a small home-based company who had four people working in a little bedroom; there was one desk in each of the closets and two more on a long table placed against the opposite wall; filing cabinets filled all the gaps. It was amazing how furniture arrangement changed this very “bedroomy” space to a productive work station.

3. Put all office supplies in the office
Does your stapler run off? Does the tape and scissors wind up in the kitchen junk drawer far too often? If the office supplies are being used outside your office, it’s probably time to invest in a set of office supplies strictly for office-use. Write “office” on them with a Sharpie if necessary, and make sure you don’t inadvertently carry them to another room where they don’t belong.

4. Don’t mix too much “home” with your office
By the same token, don ’t carry distracting household items into your office, and if you do be sure to carry them back out when you’re finished with them. Household bills, plates, junior’s broken Gameboy, the extra chair you brought in for a client. All these things can clutter your office, distracting you from your most important work.

5. Install shelving
If you ’re like most home-business owners, you have more stuff than you have room for: books, archived files, computer software. While most of these things you don’t need close at hand, you do need to put it somewhere. Shelving is a good place for all those things that you don’t use everyday, but still belong in your office.

Here are the first of ten tips to help you better organize your office. Incorporate them as you need to and be looking for next week’s final installment of the Home Office Organization puzzle. Come back next week for five more ways to manage your office space so it doesn’t manage you.

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