The Value of a Clutter-Free Home Office

Real estate pros say that a high priority on many homebuyers’ lists is an inviting home office, due to an increasing number of people working from home.

“A fabulous kitchen still tops the wish list. But a great home office now comes in a close second,” says Mark Nash, the author of “1001 Tips for Buying & Selling a Home.”

Nash urges would-be sellers who already have a home office to make sure to declutter the space.

“Old tech and papers are really laborious to streamline. But seeing all your mess is a big turnoff to buyers,” says Nash, a longtime real estate broker.

Professional organizers highlight the need for advance planning to make a home office redo work well.

“It’s very time-consuming to go through everything in a home office, so you must make it a priority,” says Laura Leist, author of “Eliminate Chaos: The 10-Step Process to Organize Your Home and Life.”

Despite the increasingly digital nature of work, Leist, who owns a professional organizing firm, says many sellers still face tremendous problems dealing with the stacks of paper, books and magazines that crowd their home offices.

“People don’t know how to make decisions about paper — what to keep and what to toss out or put through the shredder,” says Leist, a former president of the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals (napo.net).

Ronni Eisenberg, author of “Organize Your Home Office,” says the process of decluttering a home workspace isn’t nearly as hard for those under age 35, who grew up with computers, as it is for older people.

“When it comes to paper, some people are ‘borderline hoarders,’” according to Eisenberg, a veteran organizer who says that a number of her clients feel more comfortable printing hard copies of documents rather than storing them electronically.

She tells the true story of one client who struggled to manage stacks of menus and reviews from local restaurants and had even accumulated multiple copies of each item.

“It was a big waste of paper and time,” recalls Eisenberg.

Why bother to do a major purge of your home office before putting your place up for sale? Because, as professional organizers note, the untidy look of a typical home office makes a place unappealing to potential buyers.

“People can’t picture themselves living in your house if it’s filled with clutter in any room, let alone the home office,” says Susan Pinsky, a veteran organizer and author of books on the topic.

Despite the importance of clearing out a home office before putting it up for sale, Pinsky, author of “The Fast and Furious 5 Step Organizing Solution,” says entrepreneurs find it particularly difficult to clear out a home office.

“They have to figure out how to keep the company running while the house is on the market, which is extremely hard,” Pinsky says.

Take a remorseless approach to sifting through papers.

Many who work from home are troubled with containers brimming with unsorted papers. These include business reports, computer printouts, junk mail, utility bills, credit card statements and clippings from magazines and newspapers.

As it happens, few of the papers people keep prove valuable to them, says Pierrette Ashcroft, who leads a productivity consulting firm called Smart Productivity Solutions.

“More than 80% of the papers people save are never referred to again,” she says.

As those involved in the purging process soon realize, it can take much more time and brainpower to sift through papers than other kinds of clutter.

“With papers, it’s one microdecision at a time. You can much more quickly throw out a bunch of old T-shirts than a box of unsorted papers. That’s because the papers might contain valuable items — like the deed to your house or your passport,” he says.

One way to make decisionmaking faster is to give yourself guidelines on what to save and what to toss. For instance, small-business owners might choose to keep all their receipts for tax-deductible expenses — like office equipment and supplies — but throw out those for clothing and food purchases.

Try to digitize many papers rather than filing them.

Many who work from home struggle to stay organized through the use of extensive filing systems. But Ashcroft says filing all but the most important papers is usually a waste of time and energy.

She advises those trying to declutter a home office to scan many documents into a computer rather than trying to store them in filing cabinets.

“I’m practically paper-free in my own home office. I use a rapid scanner and can scan up to 200 papers in two minutes,” Ashcroft says.

Don’t take your bad habits to your next home.

In the past, Nash has worked with a number of clients who failed to complete the hard work of going through papers before moving. Instead, they simply packed them in boxes and stashed them in their garage. But failing to cull through papers in advance merely postpones the problem.

He recommends that sellers “edit” their papers, office supplies and technology well in advance of a sale to make sure they have time to finish the process.

“Why haul clutter with you when moving expenses can mount up quickly? It’s vastly better to get a fresh start at your new place,” he says.