ORGANIZING A HOME OFFICE
Keep things neat and clean, choose a chair on wheels, and have your files — both print and digital — handy
These days, more and more homeowners are working from home for a variety of reasons — from employers offering more flex hours, to an increased number of homebased startups, home offices have become a major trend. This can be tricky territory, however, given the working space is, well, at home.
“I’m definitely being asked to organize an increasing number of home offices, and while it’s great news for facilitating worklife balance, it also calls for good systems to ensure we keep home management documents distinct from work-related documents,” explained professional organizer Mylène Houle Morency of Zen: Organisation familiale. “From the get-go, the main objective is to have a clear work surface so that nothing gets mixed up into the wrong category. That means having a solid organization system in place to easily retrieve and put away documents in an instinctive manner.”
There are several basic factors everyone should keep in mind to ensure that they have a functional home office.
First of all, this needs to be your space. “You need to really try and separate the work and home aspects because you can get caught up in home life,” said Allison Weigensberg of Everything In Place. But she added this might not always be realistic, so “you need to work with what you have. For me, my office is the same as the kid’s playroom — more by design so that I could work, interact and supervise my children while still getting stuff done. That’s the efficient way of doing things: understand how you work and function and are most productive, and design the space to follow that.”
Start off with as clean an area as possible the night before and tackle the bigger projects the next day.
You’ll need a desk space. “Think about it as your prime real estate, so the only stuff that needs to be on there is stuff you use every day,” Weigensberg said.
Use vertical space, such as clips on the wall to hold paperwork that you need at hand.
Have a comfortable, ergonomic chair on wheels. Make sure there’s a filing cabinet, which is one of the most important features of a functional home office.
“A lot of time gets wasted looking for things, and one of the most important things is to have a filing system,” Weigensberg explained. “Some of us have really stepped away from paper files, so don’t neglect your digital files either. An incomplete filing system, either hard-copy or digitally, can really impede productivity.” Name files properly, using the keywords with which you’d search for them; put them in the right folders, and back them up regularly.
Small spaces pose a bit of a challenge when creating a great home office, but there are some fantastic products on the market that can streamline the process.
“If a customer doesn’t have the room to dedicate a separate space to their home office, they can integrate a secretary desk into a living room or a bedroom,” Morency said. “Another is to convert the closet of a spare bedroom into a home office space. You can make great use of the wall space all around the desk, and use a nice, comfortable but still decorative chair when doing administrative work — and when it’s not in use, just close up the doors and no one needs to know about it.”
The final step of building a home office is personalizing the space.
“Inspirational quotes are essential,” Morency said. “I love to find beautiful prints on Etsy and make my customer’s personality shine through. It’s so much more motivating to spend time in a beautiful space.”
... An incomplete filing system, either hard copy or digitally, can really impede productivity.