Is your work space so full of paper that you can’t even see your desk? Then this guide about how to organize your home office is for you.

If you are unemployed, probably you can work from home with your laptop, tablet or phone. But that situation can have many challenges. In this guide I will talk about what I would ideally do when working from home.

I talk about working from home referring to doing job research because I consider it the job someone has during unemployment. If you want to consider my point of view on this subject, you can read my article: “Unemployment and mental health“.

Now, let’s talk about how to organize your home office. We will start from the more vast space and then we will focus. We will see how to have:

• An organized place;
• An organized room;
• An organized desk;
• And an organized PC.

Organized place

First of all, how is your place? Whether you are studying in your living room, kitchen or bedroom, your house should be in order. That will give you peace while working.

Also, if you are not the only one present in the house while working from home, consider telling them you are working. Communicate that you need a quiet environment so that you can be efficient. You can’t work if everybody is talking loudly or watching the TV at a high volume.

If you live next to a street, a train station or something else that generate noise, if you can, close the window so you can be concentrated on working.

So, with “organized place” I am referring to a house that will let you work comfortably.

Organized room

We talked about the general place where you are working. Now let’s talk about your room.

Again, the first thing I would advise, is to have it in order. I think it is harder to focus in a unorganized environment.

If you work with a laptop, it is not necessary that you work at a desk. You could also work from an armchair or your bed. But since you are working, those places may be a little too relaxing to be productive. Also, they are not very ergonomic, and you may get hurt from working for a long time in a bad position.

Organized desk

Now, let’s talk about the place where you probably will do most of the work: your desk. It may also be the kitchen table or the table in your living room.

First, as we said in the introduction, can you see your desk, or is it somewhere under piles of sheets of paper and phone cables? If you haven’t already, this is the time to organize your desk. But how?

If you want to work with sheets of paper, I would advise in getting some sort of folders of binders system, so you can organise your documents. For example, you can divide your documents in a “To do” folder and a “Done” folder. That would be a beginning. Then you can separate the documents in different categories, perhaps.

You can use the same system to organize physical documents even when you mainly work with a computer. In my “Mini-course: How to be digitally organized while unemployed“, I specifically talk about a way to transfer all physical documents into digital ones. You can do it by scanning all sheets of paper and then organizing them into your file management system.

Sometimes, though, you will probably still have to deal with some physical documents. Maybe you can have enough free space on your desk so that by removing the mouse and keyboard or closing the laptop you can quickly start working on your documents.

Organized PC

So, you have your place, room and desk all organized. Now, is your PC’s desktop a disaster? If so, it’s time to organize it.

I would advise in using the desktop just for files you are currently working on. Otherwise, organize your files in a folder, maybe the “Documents” one. You can start here too with a “To do” folder and a “Done” folder, then start developing your own method, maybe dividing the files into categories.

Make also use of the sorting options in your file management system. You can see your files in alphabetical order or by the type of file, for example. When I can, I usually use both options together: I have my files sorted by type and alphabetical order within type.

You also want to have clearly distinguishable files, so you have to rename them. You don’t want to have ten “Bill scan” files. You can rename them precisely, maybe using the date to distinguish them. Again, I talk about how to do it in my mini-course.

Conclusion

These were a few tips to have a properly organized home office. Start with making an ordered an quiet environment and room, and then organize your desk and your digital desktop.

If you follow these advices you will be able to have an organized home office where you will be working efficiently.