Is your home office a mess with papers, sticky notes and pens all piled up around your laptop or desktop monitor? Are there cardboard file boxes stacked in the corner with and without labels?
If this sounds like your work space, whether it’s in a corner of your living room, the den or the spare bedroom, you need to get organized and quickly.
Physical Organization
If you have to wade through a sea of stuff to get to your chair each day, you need to remove some of the clutter. Royale Scuderi of LifeHack recommends taking some time to go through everything in your home office and getting rid of anything you don’t use to do your work every day.
Knick-knacks, extra furniture, broken or unused equipment, like an old fax machine, need to be dealt with. Toss them, donate them or send them out to be fixed.
Organization Tools and Equipment
After you remove the clutter, be selective about what you keep in your office, and put everything in a place that makes sense. Tools that help keep things neat and organized include a label maker, filing system and desktop organizers like baskets and magazine racks.
- You can start by labeling things in a logical manner with a good label maker.
- Then, put things in work zones such as files and books in file cabinets and bookcases, supplies in closets and drawers, and calendar, pencil cup and telephone in a corner of your desk.
- Get in the habit of putting things away as soon as you’re done using them.
- And finally, organize paper flow with an inbox, a to-do box, a to-file box and an out box so paper is always going where it’s supposed to instead of piling up or falling to the floor under your desk.
Business Strategy Organization
One of the first things you can do to organize your business process is to review your business plan. This helps you focus your priorities and understand the things you need to do for your business. After you get your focus, use some tech tools to cut down on manual processes and instead try to automate them.
• Get a card scanner so every contact is captured digitally in a database. This makes sales letters and other business correspondence semi-automated because you can instantly bring up contact information instead of looking for a card.
• If your printer doesn’t have a scanner, get rid of it, and get one that does. Scan things like vendor requirements, customer contracts, articles and other business documents so you can easily access them.
• Instead of a paper calendar and planner, put everything online with programs like Outlook or Evernote. When you open your email each morning, go into your calendar to check your schedule, appointments and to-do list.
• Move your files to the cloud so you won’t have to worry about computer crashes, viruses or fires. Or better yet, work in the cloud for even more organization and security. If you are new to cloud computing, check out Top 10 Cloud Storage for reviews and comparisons of different cloud providers.