The Home Office: Align Your Workspace with How You Really Work Now

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Refresh Your Workspace

This week’s assignment is to optimize the primary place where you carry out “office work” tasks—i.e., your desktop, dedicated work surface, or any place where you store and use work materials:

• Start by throwing out trash, collecting recycling, returning used drinking vessels to the kitchen. Take anything that belongs elsewhere in your home to its rightful place.
• Gather any paper that needs filing. If you’ve allotted enough time to do so now, go ahead and take care of filing. Otherwise, set it aside with a clear label to indicate that it needs to be filed and schedule an appointment with yourself to handle it.
• Consider the volume of personal or decorative items on your work surface. It’s okay to keep a few cherished items to inspire or energize your work, but anything that gets in the way of work should be assigned a new home elsewhere.
• If you don’t already have one, designate a parking space for current work projects, such as a rack, box, drawer, or bin. Sort papers, folders, and reference materials related to those projects into the designated spot.
• Don’t forget to check the floor around the workspace too. It’s often tempting to drop things near the desk on the floor, and those need to be processed in the refresh of the desk area.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.