Greg Walsh of Live It With Less writes on de-cluttering your home office

Greg Walsh of Live It With Less blogs about productivity and other stuff that will generally help you to organise your life. This is obviously important to homeworkers, so I asked if he would write a post for this blog. Amazingly, he agreed, so here it is. Enjoy…

Many readers of The Smart Homeworker would agree that running your own home business can be difficult at times and if your workspace is drowning in clutter as well, this will just add unnecessary stress and prevent you from working to your full potential.

As the father of three young children all under the age of 6, working full time and also studying university part time, maintaining a healthy work/life balance is like running your own small business from home.

Recently I have developed a simple goal setting system that is proving to work well with me. I select four major goals for the year. Every day I then remind myself of these four goals and assign manageable daily tasks

One of these goals is to declutter my whole house, and the very first room I selected to work on was with my study (which is basically what you would call my home office).

So, in keeping with my theme of “four”, I would like to share with you the four areas of your home office that you need to target when decluttering,

The Workspace: This area includes your desk, pc, printers, or any other main peripheral that is in use. If we start with the actual desk area it is essential that it is cleared at the end of each day. One in-tray is all that’s required and this must be processed to zero by end of each day. If this cannot be done, and that’s ok, just place the next day’s work underneath so that you will eventually get to it. The idea here is that if you’re not working on it; put it back in its place, including the stationery, which will need to go back into drawers by the end of each day. Utilize your drawers but be careful not to load them with junk that you never use.
The Filing cabinet: With running a business the paperwork accumulated can be exhausting, but it is it all really necessary? Only you can be the judge of this. Allocate some time and go through every single file and ask yourself, do I need this? If you don’t, bin it or shred if confidential. However if you do require it, we then need to ascertain whether this is to go back into filing or can it be archived? If I can use my tax information as an example, I kept this financial year’s taxation papers and receipts in the filing cabinet and all the previous years that I still am required to keep are now transferred to the storage area in my garage. As a result of going through each of the files, cabinet space has been increased and important current information is at hand.
Shelving: There will always be folders, books, research texts related to your business, and as with your filing cabinet, we need to go through each item to determine its value. If you still require the item to be at hand, ensure that there is a separate space for it and preferably in some form of shelving attached to the wall or a bookcase so that they are off the desk or floor.
Floor space: The last stage of decluttering is to attack the floor space. Other than your waste paper basket, there should be nothing on the floor, and if there is you need to find a home for it. This also includes, zipping up all cables and having them marked so that you are not constantly pulling out and switching live plugs.

I strongly believe that a clear workspace equals a clear mind. It releases your creativity that was suffocating underneath the mounds of clutter surrounding you.

I took me a solid month to sort through my study breaking each of the four areas into achievable tasks. Now you can either go for it or set aside a weekend or spread it over a month like I did. It doesn’t matter how as long as you do it right and do it once.

Regular maintenance is the key moving forward, when it starts to build back up get back on top of it.

Free your workspace, and get on with doing great business!