The spring cleaning season is upon us, which includes doing a little home office spring cleaning. Cleaning out your desk area can be one of the most annoying areas to do, but afterwards it will become one of the most rewarding! Your home office should always be one of the most organized spaces in your house as it usually contains your most important information. That having been said, here are 7 home office spring cleaning tips to get you started!
One of the best home office spring cleaning tips I can give you is to get rid of all the paper! Start sorting through your documents and decide what you need to keep and what you can get rid of. Then, out of the documents you want to keep, decide which you can keep a digital copy of to print off if you ever need it. Digitally storing your documents is a great way to clean up your desk as well as making it easier for you to search for certain documents when you need them! Any documents you think you need the original version of, store in a file case or box where they will be safe.
Now that tax time just ended, you may be starting to pile up your receipts for next year already. So get a cool jar to store them in or a file portfolio to sort them in. Either way, make sure you don't have any receipts stuffed into drawers or crowding your surface space. You will be so much happier come tax time next year if you have them all in one spot. Plus, it will make your desk look a whole lot cleaner!
Don't even pretend like you don't have a junk drawer in your desk, we all do! It's filled with pens you were too lazy to throw away when the ink ran out, ticket stubs you hung on to, and weird knick knacks from various spots you've been. Well now is the time to sort through it! Organize your office supplies, put your keepsakes in a keepsake box and throw the rest away, and get rid of all the garbage you've accumulated! Then, get a drawer organizer to help stop you from creating a junk drawer again!
For those of us who have piles and piles of paper work, binders and stationnary lying around the home office, it might be worth hiring a professional cleaning service to do the job for us. After all, they know exactly what to do and will do it well.
I have tons of wires that go to various devices, but some I have no idea what they belong to. Untangle your wires in the back of your desk and try to conceal them. Then, go through your loose wires you have in your desk, wrap them up, and label what they belong to. If you end up with a bunch of loose cords or chargers that you don't know what they belong to, toss them! Then, create a storage box to put all of your wrapped up wires nicely into, so that you will find them easily later on when you need one.
I absolutely love magazines. I love magazines so much that it makes my boyfriend nuts because I have so many magazines laying around the house. Thus, I now try to follow the magazine file rule. That is, I am allowed to keep as many magazines as it takes to fill one magazine file rack. This keeps me from stock piling a bunch of magazines that I won't ever read again. Make sure your magazines and catalogs are organized nicely and give yourself a set space for them. Once you run over the allowed space, it's time to get rid of some!
If you have certain files that you need in the near future, try filing them on your desk in small colorful binders! You can even get a dish rack to line them up on for an even more organized look. Make sure to label your binders with titles like "Kids," "Pets," "Auto," "Manuals," and "Medical." This way, anything you need at a moment's notice is very easy to grab! Plus, they have tons of different colored binders that will add more color to your desk's color scheme!
One of my biggest clutter problems is throwing my mail right on my desk until I have time to open it. This eventually gets covered by other things and sometimes I end up not seeing my mail for a week or more. Thus, now I have a special holder on my desk for my mail. I also don't allow myself to put new mail in the holder until I've sorted my mail before it. Make sure to only keep mail that you will really need and not hang on to statements or offers if you will never need them.
Your computer is what really makes your desk, so there's no point in having a clean desk if you have a messy computer. So put some time aside to go through your documents, pictures, and videos on your computer. Get rid of anything you don't need anymore and better organize what you do need using file folders. Also, make sure to run a backup of all your stuff onto an external hard drive. You never know when your computer might crash!
If you can handle all of your files being online, ask to receive electronic bills for all of your bank statements and bills. This will limit the amount of paper you get and will ultimately lead to less clutter. How do you organize your home office? Have you decided to take the paperless route or do you still feel more comfortable using paper?