Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

I Cleaned My Desk (Before and After Pics)

While my computer was being repaired, I took that time to clean off my home office desk. It was quite a mess. I filled my 64-gallon recycle bin twice with shredded paper from on top of the desk! 64 gallons of paper twice! This task was extremely overdue.

I didn’t want to spend any money on organizing things, but I didn’t have any more vertical stacking trays. A box of 6 cost about $15, and they were well worth the money I paid for them. Everything I need to accomplish is in one of those trays in the second picture.

Before I get any further on my desk cleaning adventure, here are the before and after pictures:

Before I cleaned the desk

It’s not clear in this photo, but the tall piles to the immediate left and immediate right of the center pile were twelve inches high. The others were two inches, 5 inches and 4 inches. It’s pretty bad when you measure the mess on your desk in inches of multiple piles.

After I cleaned the desk

It’s no wonder I wasn’t getting anything accomplished. I couldn’t find any of the stuff that needed doing!

I can’t believe the difference. I figured out that the last time I cleaned and organized my desk was in January 2005. I’ve been collecting and not dealing with stuff for nearly 3 years now. I found stuff on the desk that I had forgotten about completely. Some of those things were pretty important, but most of it was a collection of unneeded paper and things that I just didn’t put away. I found a whole grocery bag of software I had gotten out to take to the computer repair place when I thought we’d need to wipe my hard drive and start over. I also found the stapler, tape, whole punch, all my paper weights, brochure holder, business card holder, conch shell, jar of cut-up credit cards, my Albemarle Apex award cube, and the foam robots and Lego piece my son made for me to put on my desk.

I decided to organize my desk in a cockpit-like style as Liz Davenport suggests in her book. I can reach everything I use most every day without getting out of my chair. A few things further to the back are things I don’t use every day, but use at least a couple of times a month. There is one stack of spiral notebooks on the far right of the desk. I use those to jot notes and right down phone messages. If I don’t write them down in something big they tend to get lost quickly. I transcribe anything I need to keep into a file on my computer or into my online Google Notebook. As the notebooks fill up, I plan to put them on the bookshelf until I’ve gone through them thoroughly, taken any information I still need, and then I’ll shred them.

I used 6 plastic trays which are stacked on the left side of the desk (top to bottom):

• Pay
• Scan
• Enter into computer
• Business #1 active files
• Business #2 active files
• Read

I decided against an inbox because it would allow me to put stuff in it without going through it and deciding where it belonged. This way, the new stuff (mail, info, notes, etc.) goes in the middle of my desk and is dealt with first before I start any other work.

I have a basket to the left of the desk for outgoing mail, and my shred pile goes on the floor in front of the shredder. I try to shred things as I go through them, but in case I can’t do that, the pile on the floor reminds me that shredding needs to be done. As soon as I empty an envelope box, I’ll put the shred pile in the box on the floor.

It’s been a pleasure to work in an office with a clean, organized desk. I accomplish so much more, and I know exactly what I need to do. It’s made everything with both my businesses run so much more smoothly, and I’m far less stressed out and feel much more in control of things.

So if you haven’t cleaned off your desk yet, I challenge you to do so. It will reduce the stress level you experience working in your home office.

After working from a clean, organized desk I can believe the statistic that most businesspersons spend 150 hours a year looking for things (the average work-month is 160 hours). I’m looking forward to a year with an extra month of income and profits!

Order from Chaos: A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life by Liz Davenport