Bloggers tell all: Easy tips to organize your home office

With more and more women working from home, it’s important to have a space designated specifically for your work. We asked two bloggers to share their best home officeorganization tips for a cleaner, less clutter-filled space.

A home office should be cozy and comfortable, yet inspiring and motivating. It should be free from distractions, allowing you to solely focus on your work. Let’s face it — a desk full of clutter and a room that’s a mess is no place to get anything accomplished. Here, two bloggers are sharing their best tips for getting your office space organized. They’re so good you’ll want to start enacting these tips ASAP so you, too, can be more focused and accomplish more in your home office.

McKenzie is a wife and mother of one whose blog — Girl Loves Glam — features everything from recipes to motherhood to DIY projects and home organization. Her New Year’s resolution was to organize a different room in her home each week, and lucky for us, she’s already completed her home office and is sharing her best tips with us today:

• Create a space that inspires you. Having a space that is colorful, bright and full of interesting shapes and textures really inspires me. It helps me come up with some of my best work when I am creating something or writing a blog post. I think it is so important to have a space that really inspires you. That can be something totally bright and outrageous, or something crisp and airy.
• Keep the important things accessible. Nothing is more annoying than when you are constantly digging through your stuff to try to find something that you use all of the time. Keep items that you frequently use somewhere you can access easily.
• Clipboards. Make them work for you! I love using clipboards to hang on my wall so that I can display photos that inspire me and to have important contact information that I need close by and accessible. By hanging them on the wall, it eliminates the clutter that they can make on a desk and creates organized “artwork.”
• Chalkboards and whiteboards. Having a chalkboard or a whiteboard in your office is a smart way to be able to visibly see your notes constantly. It is also a great way to be sure that you won’t lose random sticky notes that you may have stuck all over your desk.
• Business card ring. Sometimes business cards can be hard to keep track of after meeting new people. Hole punch the business cards and put them on a binder ring so that you can easily find the ones that you are looking for. You can even take it a step further and alphabetize the business cards you’ve collected.

The name of Jen’s blog — I Heart Organizing — is an understatement, as she puts it. Organizing and blogging are two of her biggest passions (Her first is being a mom to three boys!). Jen lives for simplifying spaces and making them more beautiful. Due to her impressive organization skills, she gets to spend more time with her precious family. Thankfully, Jen was willing to let us in on a few of her home office organization secrets:

• Create “in” and “out” boxes. Put all incoming mail in your “in” box throughout the week, and then take 15 minutes each weekend to go through the box, take action and recycle. The “out” box is a great place to keep outgoing bills and items that you need to take with you each day.
• Pare down the paper! With everything being digital these days, how many paper stacks and files does one really need? Keep the long-term important things filed away (everyone needs to make their own choice of what is important to keep, such as legal documents, titles, home documents, etc….), and keep everything else minimal and digital. Pay bills online, keep statements digitally and move to paperless statements with your financial institutions. Less paper in the mailbox means less paper on your desk.
• Keep it simple! Filing systems that are too complex or are not simple to access are less likely to be maintained and used.
• Recycle. Set up a recycle bin paired with a shredder so that you can not only be a bit greener, but protect your identity as well.
• Take control of the cords. Cord messes can take over your desk and be a visual distraction. Remove cords that are not being used and use cable ties and clips to keep the cords you do need neat and tidy.
• Think vertically. The back of your desk is a great place to add boatloads of storage, whether it be through wall systems or shelving. You don’t need a big space to have a functional one.
• Dreamy drawers are those that only have the basic supplies and nothing more. Use dividers for your office supplies, making it more challenging to just toss things in and close the drawer without thinking twice.
• Get the memo. Memo boards rock! I love having a corkboard where I can pop up important notes, reminders and documents that need action. It’s a great visual checklist of things that need to be done. Just be sure to remove things after they are completed to keep it streamlined.
• A good planner/calendar. Whether you’re a digital person or love to write it all down, it’s nearly impossible to keep up on appointments, commitments, meetings and special dates without some sort of a calendar system.

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