It is common sense that a cluttered atmosphere affects productivity. You are more likely to get distracted and lose a few vital items in a cluttered home office. Unfortunately, a cluttered space can increase stress and anxiety. Most people working from home don’t know how to declutter their home offices. Here are several actional tips and pieces of advice to help you declutter your home office.
Why Do You Need to Declutter Your Home Office?
Several negative effects stem from an untidy, messy home office. These include Increased stress, less productivity. According to Reliable Plant, there is a direct correlation between productivity and clutter. The average worker loses roughly an hour daily looking for missing information.
Chances are this information is within reach, except it is hidden underneath the clutter. The lost hour translated to lost profits and productivity. A cluttered workspace has cables all over the place. This poses a danger to toddlers who might trip on them and get hurt. Implementing the perfect cable management solutions helps keep cables away from such dangers.
What are the positive effects? Decluttering helps you have a clean, organized, and safe workspace system. As a result, it becomes easy to locate your tools and any relevant document. Decluttering helps you stay productive at all times. You also need to declutter your home office to help your things stay durable and in good shape.
Decluttering is not always easy. You need a solid step-by-step plan to help you declutter effectively.
How to Declutter Your Home Office Step by Step
Below are actionable steps to help you declutter your home workplace
- Do not postpone. According to the New York Times, there is a close intimacy between clutter problems and procrastination. Your first step is to avoid postponing the declutter
- Evaluate the clutter problem. Get a pen and a notepad. Check around your office and decide which functions you want the office to serve. Divide the office into sections and list them down.
Decide what is working and what is not to know what to remove or add. List down everything you believe you can fix, replace, or throw away
- Start to declutter sectionally. It is easy to get lost and confused in trying to declutter the entire place at once. While decluttering a whole office is intimidating, rest assured, you can get a lot done by cleaning one area at a time. Reference back to the list in your notepad for efficiency
- Purge the unnecessary and keep the necessary. By now, you know what should and should not go.
Only keep the essentials, such as documents you may need for compliance reasons. Store old important documents that you don’t use daily in safe boxes and your attic
- Declutter digitally. Plenty of digital tools such as cloud storage provides the perfect opportunity to store documents you don’t wish to lose. This helps reduce the need for hard copies that you will discard
- Categorize your home office items. Once you remain with the essential physical items, create a system that you use to store and keep them
- Label everything. This helps you identify items without cluttering
- Return everything in its correct place.
Give Everything a Good Clean
You don’t want to store your items with plenty of dust or dirt. This exposes them to damage and rot.
Therefore, during your decluttering process, take the necessary steps to clean every cleanable item. Take note of the item you are cleaning and the corresponding cleaning detergent or material to avoid damage.
Most importantly, if cleaning with water, ensure you dry the items completely to avoid mold growth and rust.
Plan to Declutter Regularly
Decluttering your home office keeps you productive and alert. Ensure you maintain this status quo by keeping up with the organization. Declutter once in a while at your convenience, at least once a month. Regular decluttering also helps you update your arrangement in case you acquire any new tech.
Conclusions
Decluttering requires sharp organizational skills depending on the level of clutter in your home office.
Whether you have plenty of documents or tangled cable wires, having a clear management system keeps things in check. High-quality cable management solutions help you avoid the common problems associated with careless cables wires. With a proper organized system and the above steps, decluttering your home office becomes an easy process.
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