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Top Tips for Decluttering Your Home Office
Working from home has now become a way of life for many people, who now only have to be in the office for part of the week. According to official Government figures, almost four out of every 10 people are still spending at least one day a week working from home.
However, this can put a lot of strain on space in the home, with spare rooms being transformed into home offices and workspaces. Here Hamiltons Removals, who stock packing materials for customers in Norfolk, Suffolk and across East Anglia, provide some top tips to ensure your home office looks neat and tidy and is a really productive environment to work in.
Start from Scratch
It may be best to start by removing everything from the room. That way all the surfaces, floors, and walls can be cleaned before you start. You may also discover a few items hidden away in nooks and crannies you had forgotten about. These may be restored to their rightful place or just binned.
Then you can begin to think about the design. Is the chair in the right place to be comfortable, have you got enough natural light, etc. Is there enough room on the desk for the PC/laptop, and what about storage?
Be Brutal
Some items you may not need at all, or at least not in your new work environment. It may help if you have a complete declutter and divide things into three categories – keep, archive and junk. Items in the last category can be recycled, thrown into the dustbin, given to friends, family, or the local charity shop or sold on an online auction site.
You may be surprised, if you can be dispassionate enough, at how much ‘stuff’ you can get rid of – and how much space and money you could make.
Let Tech Be Your Friend
Investing in a smaller laptop, or even a tablet, will pay dividends in terms of the physical space you have to work in. Making use of cloud storage will mean that you need fewer hard copies of documents, although you may still need to be able to print them from time to time.
You will also still need some physical storage space. If a more bulky cabinet is too big, consider some shelving on the walls, which you can access just as easily. Labelling cables so you know what each one does and what it’s attached to can also come in handy; you may find you have one or two leads which you don’t need any more.
A Place for Everything…
It can be so easy to ‘lose’ important documents when they get buried under something else, which might not be quite so important. So make sure that, at the end of every day or week, you give yourself a few minutes to file everything away.
Have a colour-coded system if it helps to identify things such as particular clients or priority tasks. Knowing exactly where everything is could save you valuable working time.
And, if there Still Isn’t Enough Space…
If you need something to put your decluttered items in, we also stock a wide range of packing materials at our Harleston site on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, including specialist decluttering kits. They include strong boxes, packing paper and bubble wrap, marker pens and inventory sheets. In fact, everything you will need for a successful home office declutter.
If there still isn’t enough room in your home office, then consider using self-storage – we operate two Safe N Stored sites, at Harleston and Aldeby. The Harleston site is ideal for smaller items, such as sensitive documents which you don’t want to keep in your home office.
At Aldeby the units can accommodate larger items, such as furniture, which you may have to move out to make way for your home office. Both the sites are extremely secure, being covered by CCTV cameras, and Harleston has an alarm system linked to Norfolk Police. We are continuing to follow all the latest coronavirus advice; both sites are open as usual and we are safely despatching online orders for packing materials.
For more information on our selection of packing materials and decluttering kits, visit our e-shop here.
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