Organizing a Home Office

Whether you have an entire room in your house devoted to your home office, or even just a desk in the corner of your kitchen or bedroom, organizing it is essential to finding the things that you need when you need them.

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1. Keeping everything in one place is the first step in organizing a home office. If you don't have a large space then this might be more difficult but having a filing cabinet in one room, a desk in another, and a bookshelf at the end of the hall can be in conducive to putting your hands on important information when you need to get to it. So the first thing that you need to try to do is to get everything in the same space.
2. Next, you'll want to separate personal from business. This applies to documents, correspondence, and anything else that you keep in your office space. If you have a filing cabinet, even a small one, designate one drawer for business (including taxes) and one business for personal (like doctor's reports and letters). If you have something that can apply to both situations then consider scanning it and filing it in both locations. You can either scan it and print it or scan it and keep it in a digital file on your computer.
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3. If you don't have room for a filing cabinet then accordion type folders are good alternatives. These have multiples dividers in them and you can use one for each year. These can be very useful in tax time, as you can separate your mileage from your bills and other itemized deductions. They don't take up much room yet they still keep everything together.
4. Consider using containers, too, if you lack drawer space. A small basket can hold pens and pencils while a lager basket can hold a stapler, scissors, tape, and thumb tacks. The great thing about a basket is that it is portable so if you need any of those things in another room you can transport the entire basket, thus keeping everything together.
5. If you're looking for cheap cabinets and don't have the money for filing cabinets then consider a resale store, like the Habitat for Humanity Restore. You can usually pick up kitchen cabinets there for around $10 and they work just as well!