12 Ideas to Organize Your Home Office

To do our best work, we all need somewhere to call a home office. Even if that’s a corner of a room, it’s a smart idea to set a designated area to use as an office. Unlike working in any ordinary room, a home office allows an easier way to be more productive.

When you redesign a home office, space out any items and décor. Emphasize the space between things. Minimalism is a productive office organization strategy because it will make a room appear tidier through the emphasis of distance.

To be focused, you have to eliminate distractions in your home office or just build an underground room. A sure way to sabotage our focus for the day is to let the home office get messy. Clutter can happen naturally in any office, and it tends to be very distracting to your productivity.

When the office falls into disarray, follow these tips on how to organize your home office.

Keep or Remove Items

If you have an existing home office that isn’t organized, take a close look. There are probably at least a few things there that don’t have to be. Could you get rid of them like the tangled wind chimes that are lying in the corner?

Take out any décor that isn’t office-focused. Remove any furniture that’s just creating clutter. A home office is professional and strict. Only keep the most essential home office supplies within arm’s reach.

Shelving

There may be things you want to keep, but not necessarily on your desk and in front of you. Shelving is great for those items. On shelves, you can keep sculptures, planters, books, framed photos, stylish boxes for organization, and whatever else you want to have in your office. Freestanding shelves or mounted shelves immediately add more organization space.

Whiteboard

Have a whiteboard. Put down your goals for the day and what needs to get done work-wise. If you’ve got the time, establish your schedule hour-by-hour and stick to it. Remember to keep any whiteboard to the side of you or in front of your desk. This way, it never appears on camera accidentally during a Zoom call.

Organize Your Tech

Home office tech can involve things like a charging station for your smartphone and a way to keep cables organized, such as with a surge protector and cable ties. Place accessories, like smartphones, near a place where they are retrievable, but not in the way that it distracts you.

Get a File Cabinet

Even if you don’t have enough documents to justify owning a file cabinet, a small two-tier cabinet is still great for your home office. A cabinet means you always have a place to put paper documents, keeping them organized and ready to retrieve.

Get Rid of Old Papers

In a home office, things pile up quickly. A part of that clutter is paper. Start your home office reorganization by going through all of your papers and shredding or tossing what is no longer important. This can be done in the process of refiling and reorganizing documents into a file cabinet.

Invest in a Mount

If you have a computer and monitor, your screen is likely taking up more space than it has to. Mount it. A monitor mount lifts your screen and clears away that space for you while reorganizing your eye-to-screen perspective more ergonomically. This makes it so that less space is being used on your desk, making things appear more minimalist, stylish, and organized.

Have a Second Desk

A smaller second desk is a smart move for those that have the space. If you have a printer or scanner, a second workstation adds more desktop area to the room. You can use it as an offline desk or just as an area to put your printer, so that it isn’t cramping your computer area.

Pen Holder

Even if all the work you do is at the computer, you may eventually need a pen. It may be to write a post-it note. It could be to put something on your whiteboard. A pen holder is where you can put all your pens, pencils, markers, and other items. It keeps them accessible and looking organized.

Stylish Bowls

A stylish set of bowls is where you can put things like paperclips, post-it notes, and any loose materials you can’t fit into your pen holder or pen cup. This is another way to add some style or colour to your home office while subsequently helping you organize. You don’t want small loose items bumping around your desk drawer. Have it all together.

Desk Drawer Containers

Hopefully, you have at least a few desk drawers to use at your leisure. In those, have some bins, baskets, and containers. This way, you can keep separate items like white-out, clips, tacks, tape, highlighters, and pencil sharpeners. The containers can store any other items you may not go grabbing for as often as others.