Paper Tiger Blog

With people working from home and diving into self-employment, home offices are quite common. It has been said that at least one in four households have a home office. When is the last time you organized your entire home office (besides when you initially moved in)? If you can’t answer this question, it’s time. With clutter on the kitchen counter, dining room table and other areas of the house, this article in particular is designated to getting the home office organized.

Sometimes this isn’t a task that can be tackled in one day, but with Paper Tiger Filing System Software for document management, these tips can help you make huge strides.

Organizing Your Home Office

1. Gather your Tools: Before you actually try to start organizing your home office, make sure you have plenty of trash bags, boxes, sticky notes and markers to label your piles. You may also want to have a vacuum cleaner or broom around, as things might get messy. Cleaning supplies and a shredder, if necessary, are also some tools you can have nearby.
2. Sort Items: You can’t start to organize until you know what you have. Do you even know what is in that stack of papers on the corner of your desk? Have you opened that third drawer lately? Go through everything and decide what you need to keep and what needs to be trashed. The documents and things you decide to keep need to be sorted into piles and labeled so that you know what they are later. You might even think about your stacks such as: Action (things you need to take action on), Reference (things that you need to keep, but needs to be filed). This will be a great start in how to separate your stacks. And don’t forget a trash stack….
3. Trash Items: If you don’t need it, trash it as you go! The more useless things you hold on to, the more clutter you will have. You have trash bags and the shredder nearby so you can get rid of unwanted things. If you think you can’t bear the thought of parting with your things that you could retrieve again by a simple search on the Internet, think about it again. What is your goal? Are you trying to get rid of some old clutter? If so, toss as much as you can!
4. Use Paper Tiger: Here is where Paper Tiger fits in the equation. Once you have sorted everything, you are ready to file your documents. Simply itemize each file subject in your Paper Tiger database and drop these files into the corresponding hanging file folder number that matches the Item number in Paper Tiger. You can name them as you choose and add keywords to help you or someone else find the file easily. You can store the physical documents in the garage, or in your desk drawers, or any other place that is convenient for you. The main point here is that when you use Paper Tiger, you will be sure to find the file you need later without time-consuming searches.

Since you are cleaning out your office, you might as well make sure that you are not storing documents that you no longer need or use. Your organizing system needs to be organized as well, and once you have your Paper Tiger database set up with your paper files indexed, you can print the File Clean-Out report to help you clean out papers from existing files. Also use the Transfer Report to help you physically move documents from one location to another so the documents in your hanging file folders match what you have in Paper Tiger.

These are steps to help you get started. Of course, depending on how cluttered your home office is, it might be quite difficult to clean out your entire home office in one day. Completing one of these steps a day, (in order of course), can ensure a clean and tidy office in less time than you think. Remember to relax and take your time when cleaning your office. Don’t get overwhelmed in organizing your home office. You’ll feel so accomplished and proud, you will want to go from room to room, and maybe even tackle organizing the garage. Happy Organizing!

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Tags: Clutter, Declutter, document management software, document management system, filing system software, get organized, paper filing systems, Productivity

4 Responses to “Organizing Your Home Office”

1. Lee Davis says:

   May 17, 2013 at 11:51 am

   I haven’t been using the “Action Files” right. Most of the files there really should be either archived or referenced. What is your recommendation to “fix” my mess up?
2. Janet Baker says:

   May 17, 2013 at 5:24 pm

   Lee,
   So assuming that you already have ‘locations’ in Paper Tiger database named archives or reference, then transfer the items from your action location to the appropriate one you want to move each file to.

   For the desktop version, please see this knowledge base article that gives instructions for conducting transfers: http://www.thepapertiger.com/support/articles.php?id=361224&catId=231. Also here is a video that has a short clip at the end showing transferring an item: http://www.thepapertiger.com/support/articles.php?id=255964&catId=231.

   For the online version, see this knowledge base article for instructions to transfer: http://www.thepapertiger.com/support/articles.php?id=194216&catId=230.
3. Oliver says:

   August 6, 2013 at 8:15 am

   Organizing an office with full of papers is a really typical task. This is really necessary for me to do this on time because if I don’t do this then it will be really hard for me to find out the useful papers from that. Shredders play a really good role in dealing with all these stuff. Thank god that I have got a good one.
4. Janet Baker says:

   August 9, 2013 at 12:30 pm

   Thanks Oliver,
   Yes shredders are very necessary in getting organized and staying organized. Piling papers that you don’t need to keep just adds to clutter.