1. Start New
If you cannot remember the last time your desk was clean, it’s time to get rid of everything. Start with the excess paper on your desk, get all of the supplies, and get rid of it all. Go with a minimalistic setup with only the essentials. These essentials should include your monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Invest in a new workstation from Teslyar.com to incentivise you to keep it tidy.
While it can be pretty overwhelming while getting started, you’ll feel much better when you do it. You can make the entire process much easier by creating three separate stacks of paper. One stack for scanning, one stack for saving, and one stack for shredding. This way, you won’t find yourself sneaking the items back on your desk once you’re done removing them all.
2. Keep Things Simple
While you may have the freedom of working remotely allowing you to clutter your desk, it doesn’t mean you should be doing that. Instead of cluttering your desk up with a multitude of unnecessary personal stuff, you should have the rule to keep your desktop holding only what you need.
You want to remove all of the personal items off your desk and pick one that holds the most significant meaning for you. From there, you will want to pick out a good storage spot for all of the stuff you will be keeping. Don’t be afraid to throw away all of the rest.
3. Ensure Your Family Understands Your Need For Space
By setting up a dedicated workspace, you can get yourself into a much more focused work-mode. This will enable you to get the most effectiveness and productivity out of your work hours. Unfortunately, not everyone has their room dedicated to their workspace. Thus, you may need to make do with a home workspace that is positioned in the kitchen or even dining room.
Try to get your family or roommates involved in maintaining organization in this space. They may be able to help assist you or even provide you with ideas that would work. Best of all, it showcases to them the importance of keeping you undisturbed during work hours even if you aren’t physically at work.
4. Divide Your Workspace From Your Personal Space
It’s not uncommon to have a very limited amount of space to work. If that’s the case for you, it’s important to get as much functional workspace out of your apartment as possible. Unfortunately, having your workspace situated right next to your bed where you wake up isn’t the best route if you want to maintain a healthy balance.
The good thing is, there are ways to increased the perceived amount of space you have. One of the best and most affordable ways to do this is by getting some type of divider. For instance, you can use a curtain. That way, you can pull back the curtain whenever you need it. This will allow you to hide your workspace when it’s time to sit back and relax. Keeping your workspace out of sight will help you relax and keep it out of mind.
5. Only Allow Work On Your Desk
You want to try to ensure that you keep your work desk to your work. It can be easy to allow your work desk to become much more. It’s easy to have your bills creep onto your desk. This is where things get a little too chaotic and it can negatively impact your work-life balance.
Instead, you need to keep all of your stuff separated. Ideally, keep it in a different room. If not possible, you will want to at least have a filing cabinet where you can separate things.
6. Setup a System
The truth is, even the more organized among us can end up getting caught too much in their work. Unfortunately, for those, the home workspace is likely to get cluttered first. Therefore, you should be looking to invest in tools for the organization to maximize your productivity.
Try to think about the different things you do and how to properly do them. If you have a lot of physical papers, you should be packing your office with filing cabinets. If you are someone who does most things digitally, you can invest in cloud solutions for better organization.