If you’re lucky enough to have a home office (or cursed depending on your perspective) then you probably know all too well the pains of when it gets disorganized. The Home Office tends to be a purgatory of bills, schoolwork, random documents, random technology, and a whole myriad of other things that seem to fit into that ‘Home Office’ category. Today we are going to go over the process of decluttering your home office and how to get it organized.
Fortunately you don’t need much to start getting your Home Office organized. None of these items are mandatory, so if you don’t have these do not let that stop you from decluttering. They just tend to make your life a bit easier in the long run. So with that in mind, I highly recommend the following
- A crosscut document shredder. Some items you just don’t want to recycle without ensuring that they are properly destroyed. This includes anything with your social security number on it, bank accounts, or any other kind of sensitive data. I highly recommend investing in a document shredder for your home office if you don’t have one already. They are generally inexpensive and a whole lot cheaper than dealing with identity theft.
- A document scanner. This is another item that I used heavily in my home office organization process. It doesn’t have to be expensive. I picked up mine used at a University Surplus store along with a handful of other useful items for my office. I’ve found working document scanners at PC recycle shops in town for under $30. However, most modern day smart phones have a document scanning function built into them. So if you don’t have a document scanner and don’t want to invest in one, those will do in a pinch. Especially if you are at a point where you are just maintaining your documents. You may also want to see if you can borrow one for the initial decluttering because if you have a lot of things that need to be scanned, scanning with your phone can be time consuming.
Getting Started with Decluttering Your Home Office
I recommend dividing your work into sections. Typically you are going to be able to divide it similarly to the following:
- Desktop
- Desk Drawers
- Desk Shelves
- Book Shelves
- Everything else
Now you may not have all of these things in your office. My desk doesn’t have drawers but it’s got plenty of shelves. Maybe instead of a file cabinet you’ve got file boxes, which if you have multiples of those you may want to split into multiple sections. You may even consider splitting your file cabinet into multiple sections for each drawer. The idea is to break it down into smaller chunks to make it more manageable.
Methods for Decluttering Your Home Office
Now before we start, let’s talk about the 2 major ways of decluttering. I’ve touched on these in other articles but it’s always worth repeating.
Method 1
Method one is to take everything out of the spot and pile it into a single place (Usually the floor) and then trash and sort things out of that pile and put things back in an organized manner. I’m a big fan of this method because I like that it ensures that I don’t accidentally miss things that I need to declutter.
However, it only works if you absolutely know 100% that you are going to be able to get the decluttering and organizing done in one session without interruptions or if you are decluttering a spot that is pretty low impact to your day to day. If you’ve got kids or any other responsibilities that may disrupt you, this method does not work well.
Method 2
Method two is to leave everything in place and declutter your way through it. This method is great if you are going to have to do the decluttering over a period of several sessions. I have kids and they take up a lot of time. So a guaranteed two hour slot of time to get something like decluttering done is pure fantasy. Because of that, I tend to use this second method a lot.
The only downside is that I tend to pick through stuff repeatedly before it gets organized. But it’s better than the alternative of having a big mess on my floor for weeks at a time or in the case of any other room in the house besides my home office, to have a big dangerous mess that the kids will inevitably drag throughout the house and get into. Once you’ve decided which method works best for you, it’s time to start decluttering your home office!
Sorting Your Clutter
As you are figuring out where you want to start with decluttering your home office, it’s important to start with the spot that is going to have the most impact on you. For a lot of people it will be the desktop. I recommend getting a few grocery bags or bins that you can fill up because you are going to be sorting as you go. When I went through mine, I found some old paper boxes that we had used while moving and I sorted as follows:
Garbage Bag:
This was anything that was trash. There was no need to move this twice. This was going directly in the trash bin when I was done.
Box 1: Recycle.
Since I didn’t have a recycle bin in my office at the time, I designated a box for just recyclable items. If you’ve got a recycle bin in there, just put recyclables directly in the recycle bin.
Box 2: Shreddable items.
These are items that I don’t want to necessarily keep, but I didn’t want to throw directly in the recycle. This included medical records that I could easily get online, bank statements, and other things with personally identifiable information that could lead to my identity getting stolen.
Box 3: File Cabinet items.
A big part of decluttering my home office was getting things into their correct home. This meant that some things needed to go to into the filing cabinet. I designated file cabinets items as anything that I didn’t want to shred and needed to keep for my records.
Box 4: Donations.
These were items that I wanted to donate. They were still perfectly good, but I didn’t need them. Some of these were Knick knacks, others were things like old keyboards and network cables. Stuff from back when I was still building computers, some of it was just office supplies that I didn’t need.
For this one, I recommend finding a box that you don’t want to keep. That makes it easier to just drop the box off at a donation place and leave rather than transferring them again and possibly deciding you want to keep things.
As you are going through things, be realistic about the things you want to keep. For example, do you really need a manual for something that you can easily find online? A little trinket that was cute at the time but realistically it means nothing to you? I was ruthless and got rid of a lot of stuff.
As I was going through things, I often found things that had homes elsewhere in the house. So I made sure that I moved them to their correct home right away rather than relocating them to the floor or leaving them there for later.
Decluttering Your Home Office Takes Time
Don’t get discouraged if it takes you a while to declutter your home office. These things take time. It took me a while to clean off the top of my desk. I had quit gaming, I had quit building computers, I wasn’t working from home, so my desk was a neglected spot that things just got piled onto. A flat file as I call it. Papers and bills just got randomly put on there to sort through for later. But once I sorted through it, my desktop only contained what needed to be there. My monitors, my keyboard, my mouse, my laptop, and my desktop computer. Once that section is complete move on to the next one.
As you progress through each section of your Home Office, keep filling up those boxes. You don’t have to empty them after each section unless they are full (My recycle box got filled and emptied multiple times). After you’ve gone through each section, your Home Office should be a lot less cluttered from the reduction of items, but it’s not time to deal with the boxes just yet. Next you want to organize.
Organizing Your Home Office
Once you’ve successfully decluttered your home office, it’s time to organize it! For organization, I recommend ‘The Container Method’. This is something I’ve used quite effectively in various parts of the house for years. The basics of it are, you have a container, be it a shelf, a box, a coffee mug, whatever that contains your items. If you’ve got too much stuff to put in that container, then the solution isn’t to get a bigger container, but to get rid of something to make it fit.
For example, I have a Pen holder that contains all of my pens, but I still had about 20 pens that wouldn’t fit in there. Rather than upgrading my pen holder, I just got rid of the excess 20 pens. There were some in there that I knew didn’t write well, some that were dead, some that were uncomfortable. There was no reason to hold onto all of them. Space dictated I didn’t have room for those excess 20 pens so I got rid of them. By making the container the enemy, it relieved my mind of any guilt for getting rid of things.
So go through and make sure that everything has a home, that it fits in its spot. If you have more stuff than can fit in the spots allocated for them, then keep filling up those boxes until you are at a point where it looks good to you. As long as it is below your personal Clutter Threshold then you can consider it cleaned and organized.
Dealing With The Boxes!
After you’ve organized, it’s time to deal with those boxes! Get them out of there as soon as possible. Shred the items in the shredder box and then recycle it. Trash and recycle can be gotten rid of instantaneously. Donation items, put them in your car or in a spot where they will be donated as soon as possible.
Now about the File Cabinet. I’ve got a whole article about that, so I won’t go much in depth about it here. But remember when I mentioned that document scanner? As I was sorting through the file cabinet items I was realizing that some of the paperwork I didn’t really need but could be helpful to retain in the future.
So I scanned them into my computer, put them on a flash drive, and then shredded those documents. That greatly reduced the amount of things I needed to file away. Everything else, I put in its proper home in the file cabinet. If your File Cabinet is a disorganized mess or you are using file boxes and aren’t sure how to organize them, see my article on Filing.
Oh no! I decluttered my home office and it still looks cluttered!
As one last note, if your Home Office still looks cluttered, ask yourself why that is. I find that a lot of times when I go into people’s Home Office, if it looks cluttered it is because they have furniture and objects that are too big for the space. Take that into consideration that maybe you need to get rid of things.
Is there a beanbag chair in the corner that is taking up a lot of room but nobody uses it? Consider getting rid of it. Do you have excess shelving? Maybe reduce the amount of it you have. Or maybe you have a desk that is too big for your space and you may benefit from a smaller one.
Keep in mind that this may cost money and time, but may ultimately be worth it.
Adjusting the space to fit your needs
Now I will pose one alternate scenario. In the case of my Home Office, my desk was too small for everything that I needed. After having decluttered and organized my Home Office, I went from a scenario where my desk was used hobby computer building and gaming to a permanent working from home situation. So suddenly I needed a lot more space.
My desk wasn’t big enough for two monitors, 2 laptops, a desktop computer, a printer, and a scanner. Basically my personal items and my work items combined into a single spot. I ended up with a printer and a scanner setup on a plastic tub, my laptop was on a bookshelf. It looked like a cluttered mess again and there was no real way to declutter my way out of that. Ultimately I ended up getting a desk that better suited my needs. It had a spot for the printer and the scanner and all my work stuff plus my personal items.
I point this out because it’s not always possible to purge your way into organization. Sometimes you need to adjust your space to fit your needs.