Technology has helped humans for thousands of years, making everyday life easier and more productive. At present, most of us cannot do without technology. Work, relaxation, playtime, research and other things are easier because of technology.

Whether you’re working remotely or manage a business from home, stress and clutter will always happen. Having these issues can affect your concentration or productivity. It can be managing your business at home or organizing your computer files like photos, documents, videos and music.

Tips To Managing Your Home Business Productivity

A number of studies have shown that people who work out of a home office can improve their productivity by about 13.5%. But there are also times that you feel nothing gets accomplished when you work at home. There can be many distractions leading to less productivity and efficiency.

So how do we manage this efficiently? Here are some simple tips to get started.

1. Have and Maintain Business Hours

• Set your hours for work, even though you may not adhere to them. These hours will serve as a guideline for you, your family and friends and will let them known that you don’t want to be disturbed.
• Identify how many working hours are available to you. Do you actually know where you spend your time each week? Use our Weekly Schedule template to allocate time for work, leisure, sleep so you can visually see where you have time for other things.
• Start setting habits – for example if you have a study or a room for your home office, always keep the door closed when you’re working.

2. Keep Your Workspace Uncluttered

• The main concern for most people running a home office is paperwork overload.
• Spend 10 minutes each day dealing with paper documents that need to be filed or tossed.
• As well as allocating a small period of your day for filing, invest in a filing system that will make finding documents faster and easier.
• To avoid general clutter build up, spend 10 minutes at the end of each day clearing out items that don’t belong (coffee cups, plates, trash) and tidy your desk space (pens, notebooks, glasses).

3. Organize Your Computer

Now that the workplace, the work boundaries and work hours have been established and put into order, it’s time to organize your work tool, specifically your computer.

You know it’s quite annoying and confusing if you see too many icons on your computer’s desktop, especially if the whole desktop is filled with shortcut icons of everything you have on your PC.

Here are some tips to keep your computer desktop organized.

• Delete unnecessary files

Every file you save on your computer takes up hard drive space and if your drive is filled with unnecessary files, it runs slowly and affects your productivity. Just like normal decluttering in your home office space, you need to declutter your PC and delete all unnecessary files.

Scan your folders for old files or abandoned projects and just delete them.

• Create Archive and Junk Folders

For any documents or files that you’re not sure if you need or not, create a “Junk” folder, and for any files that can be used as a reference, create an “Archive” folder. For any completed projects you can save them to your external hard drive or cloud accounts like Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.

• Access To Multiple Devices

Just like creating folders on your PC, you can also organize your files in Dropbox, Google Drive and One drive. You can also access these apps using your smart devices by downloading the apps for your smartphone or tablet. Every time you save a file in the folders you’ve created in these applications, it will automatically sync with your PC and other smart devices and access them anywhere as long as you have a good internet connection.

• Subfolders

Once you have created the main folders, you can create subfolders to further organize your files. For example, if you’re doing a project for one client, you can create subfolders for each task, then a subfolder for each year and then subfolders for each month of every year. This way you’ll be easy to track or find the file needed for a specific project, year and month if the need arises. Also, name your folders accordingly to further reduce confusion.

• Maintenance Tool

If you can, install a PC maintenance tool. Programs such as these further help you in maintaining your PC performance and making it perform as designed by deleting hidden and un-used files or file remnants from applications that you have deleted and fix broken registries.

Free Printable To-Do Lists For Work

We have done all the prep work for you.

Get organized simply by downloading our free printable to-do lists for work from here.