How To Organize Your Home Office Space

Your “office” is something that has drastically changed over the last six months. It’s probably gone from a commercial building filled with coworkers to an apartment or a room in your house. As we’ve made this transition, and been in our new remote work set-ups for the last nearly six months, it’s important that we think about office organization.

The way our office and desk space is laid out massively affects our productivity and ability to get things done. Did you know that the average executive spends an hour a day searching for information on their desk or computer? And an average person can waste up to four hours a week looking for notes and paper that has been lost on their desk or in their office space. On top of that, having a messy space has been proven to have a negative impact on our stress, focus, and anxiety levels.

Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize the impact that an unorganized office space, both physically and digitally, can have on their performance. In this post, we looked at why it is important to organize your office. We also consider the benefits you get with organize office procedures, and consider some effective ways to improve both digital and IRL (physical) organization.

Why Do I Need To Organize My Office?

Office organization can mean different things – but, in reality, you need to address it in two main ways. With this in mind, we want to address the importance of two different organizational strategies that work together. This includes digital organization as well as physical organization of your office.

• Digital Organization: This refers to reducing clutter on your computer and smartphone used for business purposes. It also includes the use of a management system that makes it easy to keep track of projects, time, customers, invoices, and team members.
• Physical Organization: This refers to the organization within the physical space of your office. Documents, stationery, furniture, and several other items need to be taken into consideration.

When the physical space within the office is organized, it helps you keep calm and feel more relaxed. There is no need to worry about finding a specific document. When everything is organized, finding a document, a pen, or something else you need becomes much easier.

But even when your physical space is organized, failure to address digital organization can still wreak havoc on your productivity. Gaining access to files and applications on your computer, without any delays, is critical.

Digital Office Organization Methods

We will start by considering methods that can be used to organize your office digitally. This does not have anything to do with the actual physical items in your office. Instead, we consider how files and emails, as well as other documents, are organized on your desktop or laptop.

The idea of digital organization is to make accessing important files, applications, and data easier and faster.

This starts with the process of cleaning your laptop or computer. Take a closer look at all the files you have stored – chances are, there are a lot of files you do not use at all. Start by deleting these. If there are applications on your computer that you don’t use, uninstall them.

Once everything is organized, go through your emails. Create appropriate folders – this is a great way to help organize emails. You will be able to set up categories that allow you to focus on specific tasks at a time.

Finally, you should consider using a project management software to further enhance the digital office organization. There are a few options available that you can utilize. Hive is a great platform for this — it is a cloud-based remote work and project management platform that focuses on letting you work from anywhere and serves as an all-in-one hub for communication, file storage, and project planning. Hive has also helped thousands of people around the world transition to remote work during this stressful time, as everything is stored in the cloud and not at your desk or in your office.

When you’re choosing a project management tool, there are a few things you should be looking into. Here are a few things to take into consideration:

• You don’t want to log into a large number of separate systems to deal with projects, teams, clients, invoices, and other elements of your business. The more systems you need to sign into, the more effort and time it takes. With this in mind, look for a system that provides all of these functions in a single platform. This is one of the reasons Hive is great, as it includes features of different systems in a single product — you can plan projects, check emails, chat, and collaborate with coworkers with a few clicks inside one window.
• Consider the integrations that are available with a specific system. This is another way to significantly enhance the “all in one” solution offered by the platform. Some systems, like Hive, easily integrate with Google, Dropbox, and even platforms like GitHub and Slack. These integrations give you a central hub to manage everything, ranging from emails to invoices and even communication between team members and customers.
• Also, look at the reporting options available on the platform. You will likely find yourself in situations where you need access to some sort of reporting function. Make sure the system can give you a report to use – this can help you track customers, marketing performance, team productivity, business profits, and more.
• Every team has different ways of communicating, but there’s a high probability that you’re using some sort of messaging tool. It’s better for your team, and saves everyone time, if the messaging platform is within your project management platform. This limits context switching and the time spent toggling between tools.
• Streamline your note-taking. One of the things that causes plenty of digital (and physical) clutter on your desk or in your office is likely note-taking. We all have regular meetings, and probably need to take notes in them. With a tool like Hive, you can take notes in the platform itself, which makes for a streamlined experience. You can even assign next steps to teammates from a note in Hive with a few clicks — ideal for streamlining office organization on many levels.

Not interested in downloading a project management tool to manage your work digitally? Here are a few one-off tools that work well for organization:

1. Sticky Notes – Sticky Notes is a great Google Chrome extension that brings up small sticky-like notes when you’re browsing with Chrome. It basically turns your internet browsing experience into a note-taking opportunity, so you can take notes while you’re working in one central place.
2. Google Drive – Everyone probably already knows about Google Drive, as over 1 billion people use Gmail around the world, but if you don’t, it’s time you started using it. Google Drive is a way to store files, sheets, images and more in the cloud, which can be easily accessed by your time. Google Drive also has tons of useful integrations, which you can learn more about here.
3. Slack – This app is another widely used tool around the world, and has helped hundreds of thousands of people communicate more efficiently. If you’re looking for a simple chat app that your business can utilize, this is the tool for you. There are also tons of Slack integrations that you can plug in with different tools, like Hive, to make your experience more robust.

Home Office Organization

Organizing your digital space is only one step of the office organization process. Once you’ve got that covered, you then need to take a closer look at your home office setup. How organized is your space? If there is not a specific organizational system in place, then you are losing out in terms of productivity.

The first step you want to take is to clear out the clutter from your office. It is often surprising to see just how much clutter can collect. The clutter is making it harder to find documents when they are needed most, and as we said at the beginning of the article, it drastically decreases productivity and focus.

Here are a few strategies tips to help with the organization of your home office:

• Develop a filing or storage method for notes and papers. If you take notes with pen and paper, this could be as easy as taking all notes on one pad and adding a folder into the mix. The folder can serve as the central location for all printed materials, and the notepad will be the central location for all past notes.
• Keep pens, writing utensils and other note-taking materials organized in one central place. There’s nothing worse than having a desk covered in pens, pencils and highlighters. Keep all your note-taking tools in one place, preferably in a container on top of your desk or easily accessible in the first drawer of your desk. If you have a lot of things to organize, you could also put a small storage cabinet near your desk.
• Apply the OHIO method: only handle it once. If you receive mail or documents from co-workers (not in the time of COVID, but in the future), try to “only handle it once.” This means that when you receive the paper, you take a look at it, determine if it’s needed for a project or task, and then file it away in your folder or binder.
• Create an archive system. Documents that are old, but still hold value or importance, should be added to the archive system. This helps to free up space in the immediate region of your home office. For an archive system, it’s helpful to have a few different folders or a binder with sections to help you sort things appropriately. Try using a filing cabinet or a specific drawer in your desk for archived materials.
• Focus on organizing your desktop and drawers. Avoid keeping items in your drawers that you do not need. Only make space for essential documents, paper, and notes. You can always add some sort of décor element to your desktop – but make sure this does not cause additional cluttering.

Wondering what physical organizational items you might need for your space? Here are a few ideas:

1. Desktop File Folder – This ties in nicely with our first point above: always have a filing or storage system. In this type of file folder, you could have a few different folders for mail, notes, or other printed documents, as well as a section for “unread” documents that need attention.
2. Paper Tray and Pen Holder – This is a great all-in-one option for paper storage, file storage, and pen storage. Place blank pieces of paper on the center portion of the holder, files on the right, and pens and pencils on the left-hand side.
3. File Cabinet – Need something with more space and durability? Try this file cabinet system for storing archived notes, notebooks and papers. This can also be locked from the outside, so it is ideal for storing sensitive information.

Conclusion

The organization of office space at home is more critical than you might think. When your office is not organized, you may find that it has an adverse effect on your productivity. There are several methods that can help improve your organize office strategies — start by sorting out your digital space, then move toward a physical organization system too. The combination makes your job easier and gives you more control.