Welcome to the 30-Day Organize-athon!
In today’s 5 minutes we’re going to express-declutter your desk, den, study, or home office area.
Let’s start.
Day 15: Declutter Your Home Office
Step 1: Grab a large garbage bag.
Step 2: Quickly making your way around your desk, den, study, or home office area, toss these items into the bag as you go:
- School or college notes and texts – unless you just graduated they’re likely to be out of date
- Equipment you don’t use – such as a 2-hole punch if you use 3-ring binders
- Excess stationery you won’t use this decade
- Knickknacks that provide no meaning, beauty or inspiration
- Reading piles you’ll never get to – which, let’s face it, means most reading piles
- Books you’ll never read
- Old computer or software manuals
- Birthday, Christmas and greeting cards – unless they’re genuinely special to you
- Outdated printers, scanners, fax machines (check for disposal info with your local council)
- Defunct phones, computers, cells, PDAs etc. (ditto)
- Abandoned projects and hobbies and the various accompanying supplies, storage containers, etc.
- Old notebooks not needed for reference
- Old lamps, chairs and other equipment in poor condition
- Doubles of staplers, hole punches, scissors, rulers, etc.
- Any item you haven’t used in the past 12 months
- Anything broken, yucky, tatty, or inconsistent with your standards of professionalism, especially if you work from home.
Step 3: Put your bag by the door or take it straight out to the car. (Take it to the tip as soon as you can.)
Step 4: If there’s something genuinely valuable in there, put it into a separate charity store bag. If it doubt, don’t over-analyze – toss it.
And you’re done!
Got an Extra 5 Minutes?
- Return items that don’t belong in the home office area to the proper place – the kids’ bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, etc.
- Neaten anything else that lives in the home office area.
- Straighten the desk and wipe it down.
- Pop a cushion on the chair to make it more comfortable.
Now don’t you feel like doing some work here?
The 30-Day Organize-athon Mantra
Move fast. Don’t overthink. Let it go!
Leave Your Comment Below…
Pleave your comment below to say you’ve completed today’s task.
See you tomorrow!
[Image by aussiegall]
Well, we started on this today but considering this room has been a bit neglected lately, it is going to take more time to finish it completely. But, we got a nice head start today and accomplished a lot. So, done for today, just not for good 😉
Ok, so it’s not reeeeally organized. It was so bad, I swept it all in a box (ok-3 boxes), and all this was on a desk that is about 3-1/2 x 1-1/2 feet! Still need to schedule going through the boxes, but I do feel like I can breath. Hey, I didn’t know the desktop was white!! Did this earlier this week.
Done
done
(I’m playing catch up with these as I got sick and am behind)
Needs more attention, but did the 5 mins and that’s a good start!!
Done!
I did this for 10 minutes. Not complete yet, but better.
No kids to worry about–just ourselves…
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Done!
Wow, what a great list! Done.
I have to say I disliked this one the most. I.can not find away to keep my daughter’s room clean
Can you help me with any tricks? Did my five. _
Done
Will do this one once all the books I sorted out are for sale online or in the fleemarket box. (Took me hours to do this one yesterday, but it feels good!)
All Done!
Done.
ugh…Done!
Office desk is clean the rest will take a bit. But proud of myself to have stuck with things this far. All tasks have been done so far the last 2 weeks
This is going to take a LOT longer to do. Got a start, and can actually see desk now! Will continue this project over the next week!
This was hard…I work out of my home and so I have a lot of piles of paper – mostly things to do NOW, things to get done asap, things that need to be done with a deadline and things to do whenever. So I made new folders and put these things in an action slot in the front of the file cabinet . I can now just take this hanging file folder out of the cabinet with the 4 folders inside, take it to the desk and work on it and then put it away when I am done…helps.