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Crash Course on Organizing Your Home Office Paper

By Selene M. Bowlby in Productivity on February 15th, 2008

I recently came across a 3 part series of posts on SparkPlugging about organizing your office paperwork. These are guest posts by Brandie Kajino of the Organize. Simplify. Transform Blog, and I am so thankful for them!

A small quote from the introductory post…

First, let’s talk about what “organized” means. Do you hate to file? Me too! So, first of all I’m going to put holes in an widely held organizing misconception: “Organized” does NOT mean perfectly labeled, color coded files, obsessively cleared desktops, or even neatness for that matter! (I’ll pause a moment so you can catch your breath.)

So, if “organized” doesn’t mean your space looks like a magazine layout, what does it mean? It simply means you can find what you need in less than 5 minutes. How cool is that? Freeing, right?

The articles discuss such a simple method for accomplishing this! In short, separate your documents into 3 separately marked bins:

Action
Projects
Reference

I did this last weekend and what a difference it has made! Now of course, I do have a filing cabinet w/ folders – and I most definitely do need (and want) to file the reference papers properly… However, it’s so much nicer to have the 3 separate categories of paperwork. This way I know when I’m looking for something that it is in one of 3 bins, as opposed to searching through all the junk on my desk, or a big box with all of the papers jumbled together.

As the article says, I’ve been able to find all sorts of things in less than 5 minutes, which previously could have easily taken 15 minutes or more to find a particular paper. Now, I’ve got a LONG way to go still to having a truly organized office, but this little change has made a huge impact.

Please give the articles a read – you might find how freeing it is for yourself, too!

Do you have any additional home office organization tips or tricks? Please share your tips and tricks with us – I for one know I can use all the help I can get, LOL.

About the Author

Selene M. Bowlby is a web designer and front-end web developer with over ten years of professional experience in the design industry. As the owner of iDesign Studios she specializes in creating custom web sites for other businesses. more »

2 Comments to “Crash Course on Organizing Your Home Office Paper”

Marcia Francois says:

February 18, 2008 at 7:02 am

Hi! About the office organizing, if you click onto my organizing tips blog at http://organisingtips.blogspot.com and click on the Office paper computer category, there is a LOT of stuff there. And if you like what you read, then you will LOVE my 7 easy steps to organize your office ebook at http://takechargesolutions.org/oyo.html

Have a great week!
Selene M. Bowlby says:

March 2, 2008 at 1:55 am

@Marcia – Thanks for sharing your links! I will definitely go check them out – when I wrote this post, I was so organized… but it’s all gone downhill, lol. I can barely even see my desk at this point. I know what I’m doing tomorrow…