Practical Ideas for Organizing Your Home Office

While working from home has so many benefits, keeping a home office organized can be quite the challenge in itself. If your home workspace could do with some help, here are a few practical ideas to inspire you.

Start Off Small
When working on organizing just about anything, it always helps to start off small, as tackling the whole office at once may end up overwhelming you to the point of you giving up. Start with one drawer, clearing this out and throwing away anything that you do not need any more, shredding anything that may contain important information. Once you have done this and the drawer is empty, add in some drawer organizers so that all of its contents will have their own place. After tackling one drawer, move on to the next, until all of your drawers are neat and tidy.

Enlarge Your Workspace
If excess clutter is not your problem, and a genuine lack of space is, there are a number of clever ways in which you can actually enlarge your workspace to give yourself some extra space. If you have a large computer monitor, try raising this up, so that all of the space underneath it becomes usable. Add in more vertical storages compartments around the room, and do not forget to utilize the space underneath your desk as well.

Spend 5 Minutes Tidying Every Evening
If you have been hard at work all day, then it is only natural that your workspace may end up quite messy by the evening. However, once this messiness begins to pile up, then that is where your problems will begin, meaning that it is essential that you prevent this from happening as much as possible. A simple way to do this is to spend five or ten minutes every evening straightening everything up, which has the added advantage of giving yourself a clean workspace to work from the next morning.

A Printing Station
If you use your printer quite often, then setting up a printing station may be something that really helps you to keep everything organized. Rather than keeping your printer in the middle of your desk, set up a smaller table to the side for your printer, as well as all of its accessories.

Clear Your Entire Desk For a Week
While clearing everything off of your desk may seem like a frightening prospect, this can really help you to work out exactly what you need, as well as where each item should go. Keep a large cardboard box by your desk and put everything into this. Then, carry on working as normal. Each time you need an item from the box, take it out and place it in the most logical spot on your desk. By the end of the week, everything that you need on a daily basis will be on your desk in an optimum place, and everything that can be stored elsewhere will still be in the box.

Keeping your home office well-organized can really help so much when it comes to productivity. While tackling a messy home office can seem quite daunting, these are all practical tips that are easy to put into action, and will make a huge difference once they have been carried out.

Living the Minimalist Lifestyle

Living a minimalist lifestyle brings with it many advantages, from reducing your focus on material possessions to increasing your peace of mind. For those of you who have been curious about this type of lifestyle, but do not quite know where to start, here are a few tips that will help set you up for success.

Set Yourself a Personal Goal
Everybody has their own views on what a minimalist lifestyle should entail, and there is no right or wrong answer to this. Before beginning your quest for a minimalist lifestyle, you need to first set yourself a few clear goals that state exactly what you are hoping to accomplish from this. Whether this may be de-cluttering your house, or simply learning how to live with less, a clear goal, along with achievable steps to lead you to it, will make it all so much easier.

Choose a Clutter-Free Zone
The easiest way to take the first step in leading a minimalist lifestyle is by declaring a certain area of your house a clutter-free zone. Whether this is just a drawer in your nightstand or a counter top in the kitchen, make sure that this area is completely clear and clutter free. If you end up enjoying this way of living, then slowly expand that zone a little more each day, so that you soon end up with a whole clutter-free room. It will not be long before you then apply these practices to your whole house, resulting in the minimalist, clutter-free lifestyle that you have always dreamed about.

Project 333
Applying the concept of minimalism to your wardrobe can often be quite difficult, but this is where Project 333 comes in. This is a challenge that requires people to dress with only 33 items for three months, and this includes everything from shoes to clothing to accessories. While this may sound extreme, and maybe impossible for some, those who have completed the challenge have found that this way of dressing actually makes life so much easier, and have carried it on long after the three months have been over.

Remove Excess Furniture
Removing excess furniture from around your home can really help to open up each room and increase the amount of space you have while enhancing airflow within your house as well. If this is something that you are not sure about, you can always store your furniture somewhere temporarily for a trial period, so that you can see how well you cope without it before doing away with it for good.

Invest in Quality
Splurging on impulse buys is all-too-common, but these items will only end up adding to the clutter in your home. Instead, make sure that every purchase that you make is of the highest quality that you can afford, as well as being a thoroughly well-thought out decision.

Living a minimalist lifestyle does not need to be difficult, even though it may sometimes seem impossible to get started. From the beginning with a list of goals and a small, clutter-free zone, to clearing away excess furniture and cutting back on impulse purchases, these tips will soon have you living the minimalistic life that you have always envied.

Cleaning and Organizing Tips to Help You Achieve Your New Year’s Goals

Resolving to be tidier and more organized is extremely common at the start of the year, but the trouble begins when it comes time to begin putting this resolution into action. For those who want to ensure that they stick to their New Year’s goals this year, here are some top tips to help you out.

Know How to De-Clutter
The first step to staying organized is knowing how to de-clutter, especially at the start of the year after your house has been filled with a mountain of new items over the festive season. Regular purging is an absolute must, meaning that you should go from room to room and pick out items to donate to charity, as well as items to bin. To make this slightly easier, come up with a few small rewards for yourself for each bag of items that you donate or throw out, whether this be a tasty treat or a pamper session at the spa.

A Weekly Cleaning Schedule
While a weekly cleaning schedule may seem boring, this is the only way to really ensure that you stay on top of keeping your home in order. Designate the cleaning of particular rooms to specific nights, and also allocate fifteen minutes or so every evening to just tidy up in general around the house.

Be Realistic
Unless you are naturally an extremely organized person, trying to encourage organization within your home can often seem quite daunting, which is why it is important to be realistic so that you set yourself up for success as much as possible. Rather than setting yourself one huge organization goal, split this up into smaller goals, such as de-cluttering one room of your house each month, or cleaning out one drawer or shelf a day.

One Job at a Time
Even if your goal is to de-clutter your bedroom, while organizing your kitchen, in the month of January, these two tasks should not be carried out at the same time. It is easy to find yourself pulled in many directions, but this will only leave you with half-finished tasks and even more disorganization than when you began. To avoid this, stick to one job at a time, and only move on to the next once the first one has been fully completed.

Accountability
One of the problems that many have with sticking to New Year’s resolutions is that there is no one enforcing them and making sure that they are carried out. Since resolutions that you make to yourself are easy to ignore as the year progresses, find a friend, or even a group of friends, that share your organization goals, and hold each other accountable to this. This means that you not only have someone to support, encourage and help you, but celebrating your rewards together will also feel like even more of an accomplishment.

It can sometimes be too easy to give up on New Year’s resolutions, but these tips will help make staying organized feel slightly more doable. From setting yourself mini, easily-achievable goals, to leaning on your friends for support and encouragement, after a couple of months of committing yourself to be more organized, you will find that this slowly becomes much easier, and will soon turn into a natural habit.

Organize Your Vanity for an Easy Morning Routine

In the same way that a neat work desk helps to make your day more productive, an organized vanity will ensure that your morning routine can be carried out quickly and efficiently. Whether you are a naturally organized person or not, it is definitely worth taking the time to follow some of OROGOLD’s tips on how to organize your vanity for an easy morning routine.

Easily-Accessible Storage
A cluttered vanity will slow you down significantly in the mornings, and also frustrate you as you try to locate certain items that you need. OROGOLD recommends making the most of whatever storage options you may have, adding to these if you need more space. In-drawer compartments are always convenient for organizing, while in-door compartments and roll-out shelves and appliance trays are fantastic if you are tight on space.

Relocate Electrical Outlets
If you are someone that uses electrical outlets in your morning routine, whether it be for an electric toothbrush, a hair dryer or some straighteners, may want to consider moving their electrical outlets and mounting them on the inside of cabinets, so that you can easily use and put your items away without having to wait for them to completely cool down. This will save you the extra clutter on your vanity in the mornings, keeping your routine running as quickly as possible.

De-Clutter
It goes without saying that it is easy to build up drawers full of products that you hardly end up using, and one of the most important steps to having an organized vanity is by regularly going through all of the products you own and discarding the ones that you don’t often use. If you don’t like the idea of throwing them out, OROGOLD suggests storing them in a box elsewhere, so that you know that they are near if you ever really do need them.

Multiple Light Sources
It can be frustrating to apply your makeup in the mornings, only to find that it doesn’t look quite right when you move to a different light. OROGOLD recommends having multiple light sources at your vanity, so that you can efficiently groom without having to worry about pesky shadows or uneven lighting.

Pre-Planning
In addition to organizing your whole vanity, you should also be reorganizing it each night, to cater to what your needs will be that next morning. It is likely that you already plan your outfits in advance, so it only makes sense to plan your hair and makeup too. OROGOLD suggests laying out the products that you are going to be using on your vanity, and putting everything else away, making your morning routine as simple as possible for yourself the next day.

Mornings are not for everyone, but an organized vanity can definitely make your morning routine run much more smoothly. The next time you feel as though your morning routine has become quite the chore, try implementing some of OROGOLD’s tips and organizing your vanity, as you will soon find that this will make a huge difference.