If you have a lot of stuff in your small home office, you don’t have to let it be cluttered and stressful. You can get things organized and have them looking neat and orderly, even if you don’t have a lot — or really any — money to spend on organizing solutions. The only things you really need to spend are time and effort.
You won’t be organized overnight, especially if you have a lot of stuff you have to look through and decide where to put or what to do with. But you can get everything done if you’re patient and keep working on it. Here’s what you need to know, to accomplish your organizational and decluttering goals.
1. Start With One Spot at a Time
You probably have several pieces of furniture in your small home office. For example, you might have a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookshelf, and other items in there. No matter what you have, you need to focus on one thing at a time. Pick a piece of furniture to organize first, and take everything off of and out of that item.
Then go through everything you took out/off of that piece of furniture. You’ll need piles for things you’re keeping, things you’re donating, and things you’re throwing away. Anything that you’re going to put in another room or area of your house should get moved to that area, so it doesn’t accumulate in the office. By moving it right away, or after each piece of furniture you go through, you’ll reduce clutter and not add to it with another pile to deal with later.
Take that same approach with each furniture item you have in your home office, so you can get through each one separately. That can reduce how overwhelmed you feel, since you’ll only be tackling one item at a time. The only thing that will grow are the piles, since you’ll be adding to the donate and throw away piles with each piece of furniture you go through.
You can let those piles build and then remove them when you’ve gone through everything, or you can take the donate and throw away items out of the office each time you finish a piece of furniture. Either way works, as long as you take all the unneeded and unwanted items out of your office. The only things that should remain when you’re done are the pieces of furniture and items you intend to keep.
2. It’s Time to Put Things Away Again
The keep pile (or piles, if you have one for each piece of furniture you went through) has to be gone through, as well. Make sure everything there is really needed or wanted in the space. Then it’s time to determine where each and every one of the items you’ve decided to keep needs to go. An organized system is the best choice. You can come up with a system that works for you, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. For example, you don’t have buy a label maker, when a marker and tape will work.
Using what you have is a great way to organize your home office without spending a cent. All it takes you is a little bit of time and effort, coupled with some ingenuity to create a system or organization that’s going to help you find the things you need the next time you need them. That system, along with a lower level of items from the decluttering process, means you’ll have a minimized, stress-free space to work and enjoy.
If you really decide you need to buy something to make your organization level even better, try checking at garage sales and second-hand stores. There are a lot of people who donate these kinds of items or who want to sell them, and you can pick them up for next to nothing. That’s not entirely as good as free, but it’s close. It’s important to remember that you don’t really have to spend money to get organized, and if you want to spend money you can do so without having to spend a lot.
What a great feeling when your home office is finally organized the way you want it to be, and you can find everything you need in the space without stress or problems. It can be so frustrating not to be able to find what you need when you need it, but a little bit of time and effort can solve that problem for you.
