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Are you having trouble finding the important tax papers, or the receipts that you need to return an item? You home office being organized can help! Take the time now to organize home office papers and next time you need an important paper, you will know exactly where it can be found.

Organize Home Office Papers or Organize Paper Clutter: Build your Filing System

Get a filing cabinet, hanging folders or envelopes to place each type of paper you have. Label each folder with the various types of paper that you identify in Step 2.

Organize Home Office Papers Step 2: Organize your important papers

Organize your papers and group them by types. Make a file folder or envelope for each type and label it accordingly.

Various types of paper you need to store could be:

Bank statements

Bill stubs

Paycheck stubs, W2 and any income statements

Receipts

Tax information (by year)

Real estate papers & Investment papers

Insurance policies and statements,

Loan agreements and any other financial papers

Car Titles

 Organize Home Office Papers Step 3: Create an inbox and manage incoming new documents

 Creating an effective filing system for when these types of papers come in is equally as important. You have to make a habit of putting the documents into their new folders. I use an inbox that I drop the “to be filed” documents in while I am opening the mail. I make it a point everyday to empty the inbox into the appropriate folders every week at a minimum. Preferably once a day if you get a lot of mail.

Organize Home Office Papers Step 4: Purging old documents

 Purging the filing system. Ok, so now you have file folders but they are beginning to bulge at the seams. You can use the approach of trashing tax documents every 7 years and any other documents every 3 years. For insurance policies, etc. I typically get rid of the old one when I receive the new one. Unless you see a need to review the differences – or have them on hand for some reason.

Organize Home Office Papers – Step 5: Make it habit

 If you commit some time each day to staying on top of the papers, you’ll make it a lot easier when the time comes to locate those important documents needed in a hurry. If you don’t, the paper clutter will come back to haunt you and you will have to start at Step 1 all over again.

When you first setup your home office furniture, you will want to arrange and organize office furniture in the most effective manner possible.

As a general rule, arrange or organize home office furniture and equipment along the walls to keep the middle of the office clear so that there is space to move around if needed and the area can feel clear.

What are the absolute needed pieces of home office furniture?

Items you will need are a home office furniture list will most surely be a desk, a good chair if you plan to sit at your desk for any length of time,  some shelves, and a hanging file cabinet.  These are the bare minimum things that you will need to start off.  Depending on the room size, organize your home office furniture so that it will be effective to get to everything that you need without having to get up.  If you need a printer stand close to the desk then consider that.

Got an extra closet? Use it as a filing cabinet or storage?

I have heard of people that  take the closet door off for convenience and stack shelving from floor to ceiling to create storage space for supplies so that they are easy to access.  I prefer to keep the door on to hide all these items. This is a useful for smaller offices. If you need more space for books, you can set aside a portion of the closet shelving.

The placement of your desk is very important in the steps to organize home office furniture – it will create the best flow of  your office. It is most important that you can see your door from your desk.   If it is impossible to turn your desk to face the door use a mirror so that you can see the door behind you. Avoid placing your desk so that you have windows behind you.  You should place your desk where you will have the widest view of your room this should include being able to see your door.

Home and Garden Television suggests that your home office has various activity centers or zones as they are sometimes called. So organizing your home office furniture with an efficient space that is zoned into different areas: a computer workspace where the computer, printer reside, a reference center with binders, manuals and professional materials that can be easily accessed for doing research; and a supply center, where printer ink and toner, paper, pens and other necessities are stored.

Efficient home office furniture is always expensive but a smart investment. If it is a home office, consumers can integrate the style of the furniture into the design and style of the other rooms in the house, but they should also be conscious of the function of each piece. Make sure that the home office furniture doesn’t just look good, but that it provides ample space for your work needs and storage.

Since most home office furniture isn’t cheap.. you might have to do a phased approach or buy cheaper options, until you can afford to make it just the way you want it.

Deciding how to organize your office closet is quite different from dealing with a closet in any other area of your home. If your home office is to serve you well, it should be as separate from the rest of your home as possible, so it’s important that you don’t clutter up your office closet with personal stuff. A home office is often placed in a spare bedroom, with a closet designed for clothes. That means much of it will be hanging space, with one shelf at the top. If that’s the case, you’ll need to add shelving to hold different types of containers. Place them at heights that serve your needs.

Determine your needs to organize your office closet.

So what are those needs? Well in thinking about how to organize your office closet, that’s the first question you need to answer. The more you can keep in an organized closet space, the more efficient your home office will be.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Paper, including a supply of your letterhead as well as all-purpose typing paper

• Envelopes in different sizes according to your business needs

• Pens, pencils, markers (organize your writing utensils)

• Paper clips

• Post-it notes

• Various types of tape

• Files

• Items specific to your type of business, such as graphic tools

Your list will depend on your business, but this is a good start.

Determine the shelf space needed to organize your office closet

To maximize the shelf space in your office closet, make good use of containers. The most versatile and useful type is the clear plastic tub or box, which comes in a variety of sizes and shapes. You can see what’s inside each box, making it easy to find what you need at any time. Use a mix of deep and shallow boxes to make the most of the space within the boxes themselves as well as the shelves. An extremely useful item for your office closet is a three-drawer plastic cabinet, usually just 12 – 18″ tall.

Fill it with various types of paper, etc., slide it onto the shelf and you’ve just tripled your shelf space. You’ll also want to use the floor space in your closet, so leave more space beneath the first shelf. Rolling carts with hanging file folders can fit nicely here, making them easy to access without cluttering up your office. A shredder, although useful, is not a thing of beauty, so it’s a prime candidate for the floor of your closet.

Deciding how to organize your office closet can have a huge impact on the efficiency of your home office. Take time to do it right.

Organizing your desk drawers will help keep you productive. A drawer is a container in itself of course, but it’s not usually the most effectively managed space. First, drawers are often quite deep, while the items you put in them are not, so all that space on top of the items is wasted.

Containers are a major part of the solution to clutter in all areas of your house, and none more so than in organizing your desk drawers.

When you’re ready to organize your email, start with a choice between a filing structure, or keeping it all in one place and using the search function to find specific messages. That decision depends on your personality. If you like to keep things in their own place, file folders are for you. If you’re only concerned about finding it when you need it, you’ll prefer a search-based system.

Organize your Email into Folders

The folders you use to organize your email will depend on your work. If you have a boss, create a folder for Boss. If you work on projects, create a folder for each project. If you’re on a committee or work team, create a folder for that.

If you subscribe to ezines, you don’t want those cluttering up your mailbox, so make a separate folder for them.

A follow-up file is a good place to put items you’ll need to monitor, and you’ll also need some kind of reminder to take care of them. Finally, there’s your archive file, where you keep things you’ve dealt with but that you really need to keep.

Most email systems give you the ability to automatically move incoming email into folders. This process is called applying rules. Set it up so that, for example, all mail from your boss goes right in there; personal mail goes in the personal folder for later attention; project messages go right into the appropriate folder.

Here’s a tip for dealing with subscriptions. Set your rule up so that any email that contains phrases such as “to unsubscribe” or “manage your subscription” goes right into the subscriptions folder. That way you won’t be tempted to interrupt your work by reading ezines that should be kept for your leisure time.

Finally, don’t forget about your outgoing mail. Go through it once a day and move items into their appropriate folder.

The idea is that mail should move through the In box as quickly as possible, so that you start each day with it empty.

Search

Organize your email under a search system based on keywords. Just like searching on Google, you pop in a key word describing the message you want and it should come up. You can search by sender name, subject line or whatever works.

Even with a search system, it’s best not to keep everyone in your In box. Instead, move it all to an Archives folder when you’ve dealt with it and that’s where you’ll do your searches.

And remember, organizing email is a lot easier if you actually throw out what you no longer need.

Fortunately, several useful solutions to this problem are available at your office supplies store. Here’s a rundown on what you have to choose from.

The first thing you’ll want is a six-plug wall adapter, which allows you to plug in six items in one wall outlet.

Another essential is a power bar, or power strip, a bar of outlets at the end of a cord, which is then plugged into the wall outlet. It’s a good idea to spend a little extra on this and get one that is also a surge protector, especially if one of the plugs is for your computer wires. This keeps your computer from going down (with frustrating loss of information) when there’s an electrical storm going on around you.

One problem with both these items, however, is that many of the plugs that come with your appliances are big, square, clunky things that take up so much space that they cover the outlet beside the one they are using. A great solution to this problem is a relatively new item that has one main cable, but instead of a bar at the end it has six separate, short, flexible cords, each with one outlet. This lets you plug in the big square adaptors without blocking other outlets. Brilliant!

Depending on where your furniture is placed, you might find you have a very long cord that really only needs to reach across a couple of feet to its outlet. So what do you do with all the excess cord? Look for a little gadget called a cord organizer disc. It’s like two rubber discs joined together; you wrap the cord around the middle and then snap the outside pieces over. It looks like a yoyo, and it’s a lot better than a long cord that’s just waiting for you to trip over it.

Finally, try running all your cords through a cord zipper, a wide tube with an opening down the long side that lets you slip the cords inside. Instead of a whole bunch of cords running down your wall or along your floor, you have one single tube — much neater. And by the way, use colored electrical tape to color code your cords so that you’ll always know which cord goes with which appliance.

Cord control is necessary not only for appearance, but also for your safety.

Here are a few tips to getting a handle on the overwhelming tasks of “organizing your life”.

*One organizing task at a time:

Make a list of all tasks associated with organizing the room in small chunks. Rather than thinking about every room in the house right now, split the effort into “room projects”. For instance, if you want to organize the bathroom, some tasks might be to organize the linens, organize the drawers, organize the shower, etc. If any one of these is too daunting – start with the drawers first and then move onto the next “small organizing project”. Devote 15 minutes at least a day to the small organizing task. When one task is done, mark it off the list and move to the next one.

*Hold yourself accountable, and reward yourself

Set a date for completing the first room or task and stick to it. If you are able to achieve the goal and the room you set out to organize is complete, have a latte – buy a new blouse…something that you will enjoy that you truly believe to be a reward. Another option would be to make something you love dependent on today’s organizing task. If you promise yourself that you will not watch your favorite television program tonight, unless you work for 15 minutes on organizing your paper clutter, you’re sure to get that little task completed. No cheating permitted.

Managing your time isn’t too difficult, just set an organizing plan and stick to it for some small piece of time each day. If you do a little at a time, everything seems smaller.

There are two basic types of office filing systems: alphabetical and numerical.

An alphabetical filing system, as its name suggests, is based on filing your folders according to the first letter of their titles. So for example, sales would go under ‘s’, client Acme Company would go under ‘a’, etc.

But as your business grows, these files will get more complex and this simple division won’t keep it in order. You might sell at home and abroad, for example, requiring at least two sales folders. You might have large number of regular clients, and a file for each one is needed.

What your office filing system need now is a section for Sales, with all the sales folders together there. If your filing drawers have movable dividers, use them to define the sections.

A drawback of an alphabetical system is that some letters seem to have lots more files than others, so those drawers fill up more quickly and you can lose a finger nail trying to find a spot for a new file!

A numerical filing system doesn’t have that problem, as you simply add new files with a new number. So your sales files won’t necessarily be housed together, as the files are created at different times.

So although a file index is always a good idea, it’s crucial if you are using a numerical file. Each time you create a new file, you must give it a number and add it to the index with a title or description of what’s in it.

Some files you’ll use all the time, while others are just for reference and you don’t need to access them as often. If your desk has a deep file drawer, this is the ideal place to keep what I call “action files”. Just remember to move them out into the reference section when the need for immediate action is over. If you don’t have a file drawer in your desk, invest in a small two-drawer cabinet and keep it beside your desk where you can easily reach it.

Like most office systems, a filing system is only effective if you actually use it. So create an office filling system that suits your needs, and then file every week to keep it under control.