An efficient and effective home office is well organized, with a space for everything. The pristine, sparse home offices often featured in small business magazines may be a faraway dream from your broom closet-sized office, but with a little careful planning and good work habits you can make every inch of your office space count. If you are sometimes tempted to let the paperwork pile up, let it pile up in a designated place. With a modest budget, you can plan a home office of your dreams. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Purchase an oversized wastebasket and a separate waste paper basket with a paper shredder. If you use a regular sized wastebasket, you'll soon be overflowing with scrunched-up paper balls. Purchase a large paper receptacle from an office supply store. Specialty wastepaper receptacles not only hold more: they are tall and thin, so they take up less space than a round basket. The paper shredder wil enable you to shred those documents with financial or personal information.
2. Weed out and prevent clutter. Remove unused or unnecessary files and paperwork. Put papers, incoming mail, bills, checks and other items in the same place each day, every day. Having dedicated spaces for paperwork items will help you to identify items you can discard. Use an inbox or tickler file to organize these items.
3. Remove duplicate items and donate them to a local school. Do you really need two hole punches, five pencil sharpeners and three pairs of scissors? Donate equipment you no longer use and anything that has gathered dust.
4. Digitize everything you can with a scanner: photographs, magazine articles, newspaper clippings. This gets rid of the pile of magazine articles that you've been meaning to get around to reading and creates more space for other things. If you don't want to digitize, file them away to get them off your desk.
5. Separate paperwork into three piles: do now, do soon and throw out. Be ruthless about what paper you put in the throw out pile. If you are unsure, write the date in a corner of the paper and set it aside. If you haven't used it after a month: toss it. Another option is to set up a tickler file in a file cabinet and file your papers by date: this option enables you to keep paperwork for up to a year before moving it to more permanent storage or shredding it.
6. Fill closets with floor to ceiling shelving. Find inexpensive wire shelving, designed for closets, at home improvement stores.
7. Invest in combination machines. A combination copier, fax machine, printer and scanner not only saves you space, it cuts down on energy use as well.
8. Place wall shelves close to your desk for items you use frequently. Office supplies, phone, paper and gadgets can all be stored on a shelf on the wall, freeing up desk space for other things.
9. Purchase the tallest filing cabinet for the amount of space you'll need for documents. Instead of a couple of two-drawer cabinets that take up floor space, buy a tall, four-drawer cabinet.
Tags: magazine articles, other things, paper shredder, space other, space other things
