When you work from home, it is just as easy for your office space to get cluttered, sometimes even more so, than the rest of your house. As work takes up a major part of your day, you can accumulate a lot of paperwork and other necessary items in order to get it done. The great thing with having a separate room for your work is that you can just shut the door on it at the end of the day, and likewise when you are working, you have a space where you can focus. The problem with this is that is too easy for your home office to get messy quickly.
If you are wanting to be more productive, then it helps to learn how to organize a home office space to make it work for you, and it then becomes a more efficient work area. A cluttered work space can help clutter the mind and distracts you from working effectively.
The best way to get organized is to focus solely on cleaning and organising, and making yourself unavailable for that period of time.
When in business, even for the smallest home business, you will require a filing cabinet, or maybe two, and will need to categorize your papers and file them away. This will make it easier to find things when you need them and also much easier to file away each document you need to keep, as you receive them.
At the end of the day, make it a habit to put everything away in its place, rubbish in the trash can, important papers in the filing cabinet, any other documents you are working on in the appropriate place, and when you have finished doing that, you can then close the door on your completed room.
The advantage of this is that when you start work the next day, you start with a clean slate and are ready to go. You do not need to first organize your desk before getting started, and this will save you so much time. The other aspect of tidying at the end of the day, is the sense of closure and completion this brings to your work and your day. There is a certain amount of satisfaction derived from this simple action, and this will help fuel your actions for the next day.
By throwing out your rubbish and organizing your papers and books etc, you free up the space in your office and make it an attractive place to work.
An organized work space is an inducement to working effectively, and this is turn means you can be more productive. Better productivity means you do not have to work so hard, you will be more focused and you will find it easier to get into the “zone” where the work and ideas just flow!
Once you learn how to organize a home office you will never want to go back to a cluttered and jumbled work space. The difference in working styles is like the difference between night and day. The main one you will want to stay in, is where you can see where you are going, and what you are doing and can just flow through your work.
