The Trick That Will Save Your Home Office
You’ve walked into your home office and been confronted by piles of things on the desk, a few piles of things on the floor, and a number of things that aren’t quite piles yet but will be soon.
Where do you start?
A lot of advice would say to start with ten things. Choose ten things, and deal with them.
That’s not terrible advice, but by refining it a little, we can make it so much more effective.
The first thing you want to do is choose some categories. Ideally, these categories encompass everything in the room. For example, you might choose: financial paperwork, client paperwork, office supplies, things to shred/throw away, and things that don’t belong in the office. I’m going to warn you now that you do not want more than 4-5 categories, or you’ll start defeating the purpose. It’s likely that not every single thing in the office will fall into one of those categories, and that’s okay. You can deal with that stuff last.
The second step is to choose just one category to deal with. From our examples, let’s say you’re going to tackle client records first. Now, instead of picking up those ten things and wondering, “what on earth needs to be done with this?” you can pick them up and ask, “is this client paperwork?”
If yes, then deal with it now. If not, put it back. You’ll get to it in the next category.
Simply choosing some categories and then starting the task from there means that no matter how chaotic the room is, you’re only tackling a little bit of it at a time, and even more importantly, you already have a direction to go in. You’re not trying to put away every single thing right now, you’re only focused on the client paperwork. It’s a wonderful trick to keep yourself motivated and actually get through the piles.
When you’ve moved on to a second category, if you find something that belongs in the first category, leave it for now! That’s no longer the category you’re working with. Don’t let previous categories sidetrack you from what you’re doing now. It’s critical to stay within a category or you’ll quickly find yourself evaluating each item on its own again. Stay with your category, and when you’ve found everything you can find, move to the next one.
This way, if you only have time to deal with 10 things, you can make sure it’s a productive 10 things. Putting away 10 important financial papers is going to feel easier than putting away 10 random things you have to evaluate from the beginning every time, and it might even leave you with enough energy left over to put away 10 more things you wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise.