Welcome to Day 4 of the 10 Day Organizing Challenge! Every day for 10 days we are tackling a different space for 10 minutes of focused organizing!
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Let’s Get Organizing!
Today we are tackling any part of your home office.
You might have a room that you consider your home office, or you may have a dedicated desk or kitchen table, whatever your home office looks like, let’s get it a little more in order.
If you have a whole room dedicated to your office space, be sure to pick a specific space to focus on today during our 10 minute session.
What part of your home office is bothering you (that’s fixable)?
- Does the surface get cluttered up with to-dos?
- Is there a desk drawer that gets stuffed with stuff?
- Do you need to work on more of a paper system leftover from yesterday’s Day 3 Challenge?
Choose one small space you can conquer in these next 10 minutes.
Let’s Go!
Step 1: Whichever space you’ve chosen for your primary work station, the first step is to clear it off and begin sorting like with like for any office supplies and trashing/ recycling for papers you’ve come across.
Step 2: After like with like is sorted, ask yourself, “Do all these items go back into my home office area?” Create a “Put elsewhere” pile for items that don’t belong.
Similar to Day 2’s drawer organizing session, when you come across an items you don’t know where to put, it will tell you what organizing system is missing. Check out this picture from Bethany’s day 2 drawer organizing session.
She realized she actually only needed a few of these things to live on her desktop (office supplies, pens, post-its, and of course, chapstick). The rest either needed to go elsewhere or wasn’t needed at all.
Her desk space had been totally cluttered with these items, and even the act of removing them from the work space helped her to feel more productive during work hours.
Clarify what your home office is used for or what you would like it to be used for.
Having a clear goal for the space will help clarify which items belong to go back in and which items can be moved elsewhere. Do you want to do bill paying from this area? Put all of your supplies within reach so this is possible.
Step 3: Dust and wipe down the area.
Step 4: Containerize! Once you know what you’d like to keep in your home office space, organize sorted items into small containers (if necessary).
Step 5: Record any projects or tasks you thought of while getting your home office in a little more order. You can make a running list of to-dos or add time in your calendar to take care of forgotten to-dos.
Here is the homework cart I organized for my 10 minutes. The before and after might not be jaw dropping but the space sure did feel a whole lot better after a few minutes of organizing.
We did it!
We want to celebrate Day 4 of the challenge with you today, so check in with us! Let us know how it went!
We welcome all updates, before and after pics, or even questions that came up for you as you started the project. Tag us on Instagram @AtoB podcast or Facebook. Or send us an email Hello @ AtoBpodcast.com.
Did you miss a Day?
Also, it is not too late to invite a friend! We made this handy, dandy image to make it easy to share far and wide! We’ll see you tomorrow!
