Your House Your Home
You’re a model employee at the office, but a mess when it comes to personal papers. Here’s how to repurpose your office-organization skills to stay on task at home
Kelly Lynn Anders knows that you can’t run a happy home by putting kids and spouses on a time clock. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t run a more organized home by bringing a bit of the workplace into it.
“There are skills in the workplace that we can use to make our home lives more successful and organized,” said Anders, an Omaha, Neb.-based lawyer and author of The Organized Lawyer (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).“There are workplace skills that you can use to make sure that all the bills are paid, the kids are taken to their practices and the chores are done.”
That’s easier said than done, said professional organizer Regina Leeds, author of One Year to an Organized Life (Da Capo Press, 2008), who lives outside Los Angeles. “You’re paid to be organized at work, and someone is watching over your shoulder,” she said.“It’s when you get home ... that it gets challenging.”
Start with an oversized master calendar, much like the desktop calendars that were once essential at the office. While businesses may have moved on to calendars in the cloud, Anders remains a fan of the physical calendar for family organization.
Use colour-coding to assign tasks to family members throughout the week, she suggests. The calendar also provides an easy, centralized way for everyone to list important events.
“Like at work, you have to allocate time to everything, or else it will be swept away with all the other tasks you have to do, ”Anders said. “That includes entertaining and social events.”
For paperwork, Erin Kelly, owner of the Chicago-based home-organizing business Arranged by Erin, suggests creating a filing system for your papers and bills, just like you do at the office.
The key is to treat your home like a little business, she said.This could mean creating a folder for bills that need to be paid, bills that have been paid and paperwork that needs to be saved, such as tax information and mortgage documents. Set aside a location for these folders and always put them back in their proper space.
“People who have small offices know how important it is not to overstuff them,” Kelly said.“They know they have limited space, so they need an organized filing system. When they get home, though, they shove stuff everywhere.”
Productivity and task management is just as important at home as it is at the office. It might not sound like fun, but Kelly recommends that you create similar lists for running your home. You can have a list spelling out your financial goals, one that includes a schedule for paying recurring bills and setting aside set amounts for savings each month.
Another list might spell out chores that must be done within a week, two weeks or the next month. Include separate categories for small chores like vacuuming the living-room rug, bigger jobs like cleaning the garage and long-term projects like saving money for a bathroom renovation.
“We all do goal-setting at work,” Kelly said. “We forget about it at home.”
And finally, don’t forget about assistants.At work, you might have a support staff. Leeds asks, why not have a support staff at home?
“If there is something you absolutely do not like to do, why not hire an assistant to help?” she asks. “Why not get a bookkeeper or an assistant who comes in once a week and files your papers? Being organized should not be a homework assignment. It should be something you do with joy and ease. That might mean bringing in help.”