by Eileen Roth
Overhead bins to contain books, binders, and paper supplies off your desk
A two-drawer file cabinet under the desk
Under-desk drawers to hold a pullout computer keyboard, or pens, pencils and other small supplies
A wall bar that attaches to the cubicle wall and supports shelves or sort trays (See Figure 14-3 for this cool cubicle tool.)
Figure 14-3: Wall bars support everything from extra shelves to sort trays.
Work with your colleagues and office personnel to ensure convenient placement of such shared items as printers, copiers, and fax machines. These resources can be key variables in your productivity equation.
The Home Office
Everything I covered in this chapter pertains to any sort of office, but there are some special considerations when the office is at home. Your home office may be your primary workplace, or just a site for handling work you brought home from headquarters. In either case, making your home workplace work can provide professional results from everything you do there.
A basic principle for any workplace is that you want to minimize distractions. At home, you have to balance that priority with available space and your own personal style. Ask yourself a few questions to get started:
How much space do you need to accomplish your tasks and store your supplies? (The layout process should provide the answer to this.)
Do you prefer solitude and quiet, or do you need to know what’s going on in the rest of the house?
What temperature and lighting conditions make you most productive? Where can they be found?
In my experience as a home-based business owner and a consultant, the best solution is a dedicated room. Second best is an infrequently used room, such as a guest bedroom, that can be devoted to business 90 percent of the time. Last on the list, but sometimes the only alternative, is sharing space with a family/media room, kitchen, or bedroom. Don’t worry. You can make the available room work!
Choose the best location for your home office by referring to the pros and cons listed in Table 14-1.
Table 14-1Home Office Locations Place Pros Cons
Basement Quiet and isolated for Can be windowless, dark, and
working and thinking. cold. You don’t know whether
the weather is right for a run
to the office store or copy
place, or if the kids are home
from school.
Guest bedroom All yours when No work possible when
guests aren’t there. you have guests. Need to
Most of the closet is free compete for space with
for storing supplies. bedroom furniture, which
may tempt you to take a few
zzzs when you ought to be
working.
Media room Great double use Other household members are
of space for singles. likely to be blasting music or
movies. You and your guests
can’t relax and watch a movie
in your office.
Bedroom Many apartment and Hard to sleep peacefully
condo dwellers have in your office with your desk
no choice. Leaves staring you down. Your part-
the living room ner’s sleep schedule may be
uncluttered and restful. interrupted. Space is limited.
Kitchen Allows you to get basic Constant distractions on this
household paperwork done stretch of household super
while still watching the kids highway. Forget about
and staying in the thick making client calls from
of things. here!Watch out for curious
hands.
If your home office must share space with another function, create a visual and psychological divider with a tall bookcase or decorative trifold screen.
Choose your work space wisely . . . and change it when necessary
When I began my home-based business, I thought the basement would make a great space for my office. With a seldom-used sewing room already in place, the ground floor seemed like a natural double-up.
I lasted two, maybe three months. I didn’t like the dark, the cold, or not knowing when my daughters came home from school. If my business was to survive, I needed a change, but what?
All the other rooms in the house were fully booked or so it seemed. The fourth bedroom served as a guest room, primarily accommodating our parents when they came to visit. That was just two weeks a year, so why not move the guest room down to the basement and let me emerge into the light?
My move upstairs changed my mood for the better and bolstered my business. There was sunlight. There was solitude when my kids were in school, a clear signal when they got home, and a door to close if I needed privacy.
Household Information Center
Here’s some food for thought: Your household information desk should function even better than the offices at Fortune 500 corporations. Why? Because you don’t have a staff of thousands and sophisticated systems taking care of business. It’s just you against the world and that stack of bills.
Your household information center may be located center stage at a built-in desk in the kitchen, in a room all its own, in a corner of the basement, or sharing quarters with a home office you use for business.
Think twice before doubling your household information center with a home office. Are you asking for interruptions when somebody needs a pen or a birthday card while you try to concentrate or make a client call?
The household information desk
The desk is the heart of the household information center. If you make do with your old kitchen table, buy some freestanding drawers such as those pictured in Figure 15-2 in the chapter on desks. While there, stop and check out the principles for setting up a desk for success. Then tailor the desk to the task with a few additional household hints:
Split the pen/pencil center into two drawers if you have kids to keep the younger generation out of yours. Remember that permanent markers can become permanent wall art in the hands of toddlers.
Personalize the stationery center. Use boxes or dividers in the drawer to create separate categories: personal stationery; note and thank you cards; birthday and anniversary cards; and get well and sympathy cards.
Buy greeting cards in bulk so you always have one when you need it. Don’t forget a few baby and wedding cards too.
Create a money center drawer. Put check refills, current bank statements, mortgage payment books, and a check box to hold current credit card receipts and statements here. If there’s room, add a calculator to run the numbers. (Bank and credit card statements can be kept in a file folder if you don’t have room here.)
Contain it. Many built-in kitchen desks come with cabinets that can hold directories — telephone, personal, school, and membership — as well as the family camera and any stationery, cards, and envelopes that don’t fit into drawers. You can substitute a wall or stand-alone cabinet or shelf if you don’t have built-ins.
Household filing system
Create your home filing system according to the A-B-C principles discussed in Chapter 16 on information flow. Active files go in a cabinet in the information center, and inactive files should be boxed up for storage, here or somewhere else. You should be able to contain home files in about two file drawers (unless you have an extensive financial portfolio) plus a box for warranties. The most common household filing categories include
Auto: Keep separate files for each car, including mileage logs, gas receipts if tax deductible, and maintenance and repair receipts, which can help the resale value.
Career: Start a resume file with your first job and keep one copy of each version for reference, with one or two masters showing supervisor names and phone numbers and salary information. (You may think these facts are engraved in your brain forever but wait until you’ve worked another job or two and you’ll see why you need to write it down!)
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Education: Save all degrees, continuing education units (CEUs), certifications, and transcripts. If you have children, keep a file for general information on their schools and year-end (not quarterly) report cards.
Financial: Keep bank statements in a file. Let the bank store your checks and get a copy if necessary. Retain only the latest utility statements unless you’re submitting them for free light bulbs or saving them to create a budget.
Keep current tax information in active files. After you finish your annual income tax return, purge anything you aren’t required to save and move retained files into inactive storage. The minimum to keep past tax records is seven years, but many experts recommend holding on to returns for life.
Save records for capital gains and account tracking for stocks, bonds, funds, CDs, IRAs, Keoghs, and 401Ks. Toss monthly statements when you receive quarterly or annual reports. Some people prefer to use binders for investment documents.
Health: If you currently follow an exercise or diet regime or a course of treatment for a particular condition, keep relevant information in this file. Throw away anything that doesn’t pertain to your present condition, as such information changes fast.
Insurance: Keep all receipts and insurance claim paperwork for one year unless the claim is still open.
Legal: Marriage and birth certificates, divorce papers, adoption papers, car titles, passports, real estate closings, trusts, wills, leases, and so on. Keep copies in your files for reference and store the originals in a safe deposit box.
Medical: At the end of the year, transfer medical information to one list per person, including major illnesses and injuries, date, doctor’s diagnosis (with name and phone number), and treatment. You can create a computer spreadsheet or word-processing table to make tracking medical info easier.
Real estate: Information on your home and improvements. Current home-improvement projects are filed in the active files. Put completed home improvements in the in active files.
Travel: Toss information for any trip you’re not planning to take this year. Your travel agent or the Internet will have updated the facts by the time you’re ready to pack your bags.
Do you really need every card or letter you ever received? Save only a select few of the most special in a memory box in storage.
Warranties, receipts, and instructions
Maybe it’s time to program the VCR or fax machine and the instructions are nowhere to be found, or the dishwasher has conked out two weeks after purchase and the receipt has gone missing. A good warranty file can help you get your money’s worth out of what you buy and save the space taken up by storing outdated information.
Here’s how to organize the information that can keep your appliances and devices running smoothly:
1.Get a plastic box with built-in rails for hanging files.
2.Make a hanging file and colored tab for each room of the house. Items that are used all over the house should be grouped into their own categories — TVs, VCRs, vacuum cleaners, and so forth. This simplifies the situation when the power goes out and you need to go around and reprogram, or you need to buy a new TV and you want to see what you paid for the past ones.
3.Use folders to create a few subdivisions within rooms — for instance, large and small appliances in the kitchen, or lawn, snow, and tools in the garage.
4.Staple the instruction book, warranty, and receipt for each item together and file.
5.Whenever you discard or donate a piece of equipment, pull the documentation from the file and send it along too.
Keep the special wrench for the garbage disposal in your warranty file box so it doesn’t get mixed up with or mistaken for something else.
Children’s papers and memories
Swamped by small masterpieces of art and literature? Nobody generates more paper than children in school, and viewing each one as a treasure is natural for the creators and their proud parents. Of course these creations are special but I can assure you, both as a parent and a professional organizer who’s faced down this issue with many other parents too, that you really won’t want or need these papers in the future. Still the instinct to save at least a few special things runs strong. The solution? A memory box.
To make a kid’s memory box, purchase a file storage box with built-in handles, one for each child. Label it with the child’s name. Inside goes one manila folder per year, labeled with the year and containing one drawing, poem, story, book, and writing sample. At the end of the school year, sit down with your child and have him or her pick out the best item in each category to save. There are three simple rules of the game:
You can’t keep anything that can crumble or break, which includes artwork with big clumps of paint.
Food products such as the ever-favorite macaroni necklace are forbidden. Not only are they fragile, but food can bring on the bugs.
A child’s memento collection cannot outgrow the box. If the box gets full, some old things have to go to make way for the new.
Adding to the memory box makes a nice wrap-up to the school year and teaches the lesson that less is more. Now whisk that box off to a storage area for lesson number two: Living spaces aren’t for archives.
Junior high and high school papers
Junior high and high school kids need a functional filing system to track their schoolwork and papers pertaining to activities. Give teens a head start on high achievement by teaching them to manage information flow from the get-go.
To set up a junior filing system, buy a sturdy container, such as a crate, with a built-in rack for hanging files. Use hanging file folders and tabs to create general categories for academics — math, science, social studies, history, foreign language, arts, and so on. Stick to generic names so you won’t have to rename the category each year as the child segues from algebra to geometry. Add activity categories such as sports, clubs and groups, lessons, religion, and so forth, and one more for school information.
Show your child how to use the system to file current handouts, tests, reports, flyers, and other papers by category and class. Most files can be completely purged after final exams. As students get older, they may want to hold on to certain items such as the periodic table or algebraic formulas. Use a separate plastic box with built-in rails for hanging files to hold important papers over the long term.
A working work space doesn’t just feel good — it delivers tangible rewards. Thoughts become actions and efforts become results, because everything is in its place according to your personal needs. Organize and watch your productivity rise.
Chapter 15
Command Central: The Desk
In This Chapter
Clearing off your desk with R-E-M-O-V-E
Reaping the benefits of the right-now rule
Cleaning and stocking desk drawers
Cool computer workstation tips
T he world turns on the work done at desks. Not to discount the efforts of workers in the fields, on store floors, or heading up the car pool, but eventually every product and service passes over somebody’s desk. And from the look of some of the desktops I’ve seen, the fact that our economy still functions is a minor miracle.
The desk is the ultimate work center. Maximize desktop potential by putting everything in place, and your desk will drive your best efforts, facilitate your daily schedule, and set you up for success. Don’t settle for less.
The Desk Is a Place to Do Work
Whether you look out over an expanse of burnished mahogany or pull up to an old kitchen table, the simple truth is the desk is a place to work.
In the hustle of daily life, you may forget what the desk is actually for. I’ve seen clients who turned their desks into a combination display case, dining table, bookshelf, and filing cabinet. No wonder they called me in for help.
This chapter is about restoring the original purpose to the most important piece of furniture in your office. Before you tackle the job, read over the previous chapte
r for tips on choosing and placing the right desk in your office. Now get down to what you do there.
What your desk says to the world
They say first impressions take six seconds, but your desk speaks even faster. What do you think when you see someone sitting among piles of papers, knickknacks, and supplies? Do the words capable, professional, in control spring to mind? Probably not. Your desk projects a powerful image to your colleagues, clients, staff, and superiors, and a mess sends the wrong message.
Even more important, the state of your desk speaks to you. Do you ever feel fatigued when you can’t find your current project file in the pile, stressed when the message pad has disappeared with an important caller on the line, creatively blocked by a crowded view that leaves no room to think?
You can have control over what your desk says to you and the world. Make your desk say “success.”
Clearing the desk
Over the course of curing many desktop disasters, I developed a simple system for clearing off the desk and setting up all your accessories and supplies for fingertip management of your job. Try the system and see if your work gets easier while your reputation improves. All you have to do is R-E-M-O-V-E.
Here’s a rundown of the R-E-M-O-V-E process.
Reduce distractions: Clear the desktop of anything that catches your eye or encourages people to visit such as in/out boxes, papers and files, photos, knickknacks, candy, or cookies. Keep your snacks inside your desk or credenza so you can work in peace. Move all your knickknacks to another surface and leave them for a day or two. After your trial separation, choose just a few to keep somewhere off the desk and pitch or donate the rest. Clear off photos by hanging them on the wall behind you or finding a display spot off your desk and outside your direct line of vision. Snowplow piles by using the right-now rule: If you’re not using the paper or file right now, put it away.