There are many benefits associated with working from home, but keeping your office desk can be really hard.
If your office desk looks cluttered and doesn’t invite you to sit down to work, it most likely prevents you from completing the task you have pending.
You may need to spend a few hours cleaning up the mess before doing any substantial work.
If this sounds like your everyday problem here are some ideas that can help you get organized and keep track of the current clutter:
Six Tips to Keep Your Home Office Desk and Uncluttered
A great way to make sure your office is desk is to use a laptop instead of a desktop computer. A laptop not only takes up considerably less space on your table or desk but also consumes less energy.
If your work demands a desktop PC, you can opt for one that has a slim, flat-screen LCD monitor that takes up less space, looks good on the table, and uses less electricity compared to bulky computers.
Second, you could switch to paperless billing to free up more space in your office and reduce your environmental impact. There are numerous benefits associated with choosing paperless invoicing, e-invoicing, or digital invoicing as it is also known, over paper.
E-invoices will just add another email to your inbox, and you’ll have a more organized and free desk, plus fewer things to file in the library.
When you save paper, you not only save the trees used in its manufacture, but you also save greenhouse gases, fuel, and the millions of m3 of water that is used annually throughout the paper manufacturing and distribution process.
For several years I have replaced the payment of utility bills with online payment, in this way I began by not having to keep paper invoices, since after paying the system offers to print the payment receipt, so Instead of printing it on paper, I do it in PDF that I save in an administration folder on my hard drive. If you were to have a problem with the disk, the payment systems keep a record of each online payment separated by theme. This way you can always get them back.
The next step is to accept the electronic invoice from the companies that offer it, so you don’t even receive a paper.
To organize expirations, I add them to my Google calendar with two reminders (one the day before the expiration and one during the morning of the same day).
If you have a lot of important papers lying unorganized on your desk then consider purchasing appropriate folders to keep the papers well organized.
This not only frees your desktop from clutter but also protects your documents and makes them easier to locate when you need them.
The third easy method to keep your desk organized is to download the software you need instead of buying it from a traditional retailer. This will avoid the CDs, owner’s manual, packing materials, and the box.
You might be surprised to learn that almost 1 trillion records are thrown away every year, which contributes greatly to the waste problem. Therefore, I recommend you join the digital revolution and download the programs instead of buying them offline.
Before being misunderstood, I am going to clarify a bit, downloading does not imply stealing the software, currently, most companies offer their products to be downloaded online upon payment of a price that is usually much lower than the packaged version.
There are companies like Adobe that have gone a step further and offer a subscription system to use their products, so instead of actually buying them you are subscribing to a kind of leasing.
Fourth, skip the answering machine and replace it with voicemail. According to a recent survey, if all answering machines currently in use in American homes were replaced with voice mail, then the energy savings would be approximately 2 trillion kilowatt hours per year. So you can have one less machine on your desk and also do your part in conserving the world’s energy.
Fifth, if your job requires the daily use of multiple computers for different types of tasks like printing, faxing, scanning, and photocopying, the cost may be too high to start with, in addition to the large space they take up.
One solution is to purchase a multifunction printer that is quite affordable and takes up little space.
And sixth and last, recycling is the best thing you can do if you want to leave your children a better future. If we take any average home, we will find a wide range of electronics that we no longer use, such as old televisions, DVD players, VCRs, cell phones, answering machines, and video games.
Instead of piling them up in drawers or cluttering up the desk, it would be much better to get rid of them, either by donating them (there are NGOs that are in charge of upgrading this equipment and distributing it to schools or organizations that need it) or selling it online.
Conclusions
Having an orderly workplace means getting to what matters first instead of wasting time looking for papers.
With houses and apartments getting smaller, working from home means taking space away from other family activities, so it is very important to use what we have wisely and keep it desk and easily accessible.
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