Do You Love Your Home Office?

How would you describe your home office? Neat, tidy and organized? Chaos?

I can honestly say my home office is often less than stellar. It's a project I am working on as I write this to you. I don't care how long this takes me; I am going to create my home office to be a place I really want to be in for however many hours a day.

How much time do you waste just looking for something? You know you have it on your desk somewhere, right?

Here are some tips to help you:

If you are someone who prints out articles, emails etc besides being really bad for trees, you probably have unnecessary papers all over your office and in your files. Speaking for myself, I print out my ezines when I get them in my email. Then I file them. Silly right? My new plan is to simply create a file on my computer and save them there. How simple is that?

There are 3 rules for paper. File it, keep in computer or put it in the trash.

Take your small piles and put them in one big pile. One by one, go through each paper and make a decision what you are going to do with it.

At the end of each day take some time to clear off your desk. Think of how wonderful you will feel the next morning when you walk into your office.

What a lovely way to start out your day right? Wouldn't that feel good to you?

Think how organized, creative and successful your day will be when you start out right.

I have also heard that highly successful people write up their 'to do' list the night before, not the day of. I have adopted this myself and find it works wonders. A clean desk and a 'plan' makes for a great day of work. And in fact, saves all kinds of time allowing more free time.

The other clutter that can trip you up is emails. How many emails do you keep in your computer?

That's a topic of its own but a couple of tips are to turn off the 'ding' so that every time an email comes through you literally hear it and turn off the notification that has your email float at the bottom of your screen. At first I thought that was great because I could be working on something, like in a Word Doc, and see the emails as they came through. Wow, was I ever wrong. I found it unbelievably distracting.

Make the 'delete' button your friend. Do you really need hundreds or even thousands of emails?

This is a very simplistic article. I also think it can be the start of a work friendly office space for you.

This way when you walk into your home office every morning you have a good feeling and are on your way to a productive day.