Getting Organized in Your Home Office

This is a biggie, and the main problem that most people have with their offices. If your desk is cluttered with papers, half-finished projects, drawings that your kids made and three dozen post-it notes, then it’s no wonder that you’re not getting any work done! Put up a bulletin board to hold your “to do” list, find a system for getting your unfinished projects under control, file what can be filed, and recycle the junk. Hang your kids’ drawings on the wall or put them on the fridge in the main part of the house.

This is great advice, but nearly impossible to follow perfectly. Still, do the best that you can. If you are opening mail, do it over the recycling bin so that you can dump the junk mail directly into the bin. If you can, deal with each document that comes in right away. File it, answer it, pay the bill (or set up an automatic payment on the correct day), or take whatever action is necessary. If you can’t, put it in a designated place. Remember that it’s not a permanent home for your items, just a temporary holding tank. Make time each week to go through this “inbox” and deal with your piles.

You may think that your digital correspondence is not adding to your mayhem, but it is. If you are spending too much time dealing with email, then you are not using your time wisely. Determine how often you really need to check your email, and don’t log in any more often than that. Most people can realistically cut back to checking mails three times per day: First thing in the morning, right before or right after lunch, and an hour or so before the end of the workday. If it makes you feel better, set up an auto-response that will let the sender know that you will be checking emails regularly, and that if it’s an emergency, he or she should call you. In the vast majority of cases, though, you will not be receiving emergency emails anyway, so this is probably not even necessary.

This is something that you can “hire” one of your children to help you with. First, try to write with all of the pens. Throw away the ones that don’t work. Next, go through your other office supplies. Do you have a stapler that only works on rainy Tuesdays? White-Out that you’ve had for the past six years? Paper clips that are bent completely out of shape? Throw away all of these items. If you need to, hit the office supply store and purchase new supplies. While you’re at it, pick up a drawer organizer or some other tool for keeping supplies well-organized.

Tax time comes sooner than you expect it to each year, and if you’re self-employed, you may be paying taxes quarterly. Keep records as your accountant advises you to. If you are claiming your home office as a business deduction, talk to a tax professional first to be sure that you meet all of the criteria. You have to keep certain documents for a specific number of years, so make sure that you know what the rules are; your tax advisor can help you with this.

Having a home office allows you to work from home, which can be wonderful! Unfortunately, it also means that you have to have a good system going in order to stop work from taking over your whole life. Getting your home office organized is the first step to coming up with that system.