Top 5 Tips for an Organized Home Office
Working from home can be a struggle on a good day. It is so easy to get pulled away from your ‘work’ in order to help with or finish a ‘home’ task. These thoughts of what needs doing are hard to fight away when you’re working out of the home and can be even harder when you’re working in the home faced with piles of laundry, sinks of dirty dishes, dusty shelves, overgrown lawns, and dinner to put on the table…. just to name a few.
However, even in the face of all of that, there are five crucial tips that can help you to stay on task and get the most productivity out of your day.
Check Your Emails and Voicemails at the Start of Each Day
Clearing out your inbox and flagging your most urgent messages will help you to prioritize your tasks and begin your day with a clean slate. It will also allow you to set your pace for the day and it will be easier to stay on track. If you have urgent home business to attend to as well, this is a great time to schedule it into your work day. There will always be things that ‘pop’ up throughout the day, but by outlining your tasks before this happens, it will be easier to handle those unexpected situations and prioritize what needs to be done immediately and what can be pushed off to later in the day or the next day.
File All ‘Paperwork’ on the Day it is Received
In today’s age, paperwork doesn’t always mean physical hard copies of documents. It can also mean the PDFs you receive via email, the messages you need to save outside of your inbox, and the electronic invoices and contracts you send and receive from your clients. Just because you don’t always need to print them, doesn’t mean you don’t need to file them in a safe, secure, and memorable location. By creating and following a guideline for e-files, you will have less buildup on your virtual workspace and desktop which will help keep you from becoming overwhelmed. By e-filing as you receive documents, you will be more likely to save them in the correct e-file folder and won’t find yourself struggling weeks later to recall where that specific document is. This will save you hours of time searching and becoming frustrated.
Review E-Files Monthly to Ensure They are Accurate and Up to Date
I know this might seem like overkill, because if you’re following the filing process you might think you don’t need to self-audit once each month. But this is a task that might only take 1-2 hours of your time and is a good practice to get into. You’ll be able to review the work you completed that month and link over to where your e-files are located, confirming that invoices were received and paid, contracts were signed and are ready to begin, and correspondence has been kept up to date. The peace of mind this small task affords is absolutely worth 2 hours of your time once each month. This is also a great time to touch base with your clients, whether previous, current, or future, to ensure everyone is on the same page – it adds that extra personal touch that working remotely can sometimes takes away.
Keep a Clear Workspace
Working from home looks different in every household. You may have taken over half of the dining room table, the kitchen island, the guestroom, your children’s playroom, or you may have a mobile station for wherever is quietest in your home. That being said, a clear workspace is a productive workspace. With less distractions around you, you’ll be able to save time attempting to focus and you won’t have to dig through paperwork, snack wrappers, containers, coffee cups, and planners looking for what’s important on that day. (This is also where your daily filing comes in handy!) Working from home is challenging – whether you live alone or with multiple people (of varying ages), but if you can create a clear and concise workspace you will be eliminating one of those challenges. You’ll be able to lock into your day with less distractions and less feelings of being overwhelmed. It will also provide you with the opportunity to close things away and properly ‘log off’ at the end of your work day without staring at what appears to be a pile of work waiting for you when it’s really just a pile of work you’ve already completed.
Keep a Notepad Close at Hand
Your notepad can be a word document one your computer or it can be a physical book at your workspace – whatever is best for your work ethic. Either way, it will come in especially handy for recording any business correspondence each day. It will provide you with proper notes to turn back to for reference when working on client projects and/or orders and at a glance is a great recap for all you’ve accomplished each day. This is also a great place to outline your task list for the day so you can be sure you’ve stayed on track and accomplished all you’ve set out to. It will also allow you a reliable place to set reminder notes for non-urgent tasks that can be pushed over until the next morning as more urgent tasks arise throughout your workday.
