The 3 Steps To Be Able To Declutter Your Home Office

**Collaborative post**

It is well known at this point that clutter leads to anxiety and even depression. If your home is cluttered then chances are that you are going to be stressed out quite frequently. Now, if you are working from home and your home office is cluttered then you are not only going to be suffering from anxiety but you will also be less productive. 

Although many people focus on ergonomics when designing their home office, not enough attention is put into keeping it organised and clutter-free. The focus should be on creating a tidy and workable home office space so you can be more productive and have fewer stressful moments when working from home. In this article, we will go over several ways to keep the clutter to a minimum. 

1 – Deal with the cables

No matter how tidy you keep your workspace, if there are cables all over the place it is going to look cluttered. They make it difficult to stay organized and can even take up precious space. The key is to have a system to keep cords and cables situated.

The first thing to do is to try to avoid having cords in the first place. Get set up with as many wireless devices as possible so you don’t have to manage your cables. The primary ones to start with are a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse. That takes a lot of cables off of the desk itself. 

You can even use Bluetooth to set up printers that don’t need to have cables attached. This can also free up space since you can put your printer wherever you please if it doesn’t depend on a wired connection. 

If you are forced to keep your wires then you’ll need some desk cable management tips to keep them tidy. One such tip is to use ties to keep them all together so they aren’t all over the place. 

2 – Go paperless

Do you have stacks of papers on your desk that seem to have no logical place to be put away? Are your filing cabinets already full? These are sure signs that you need to go paperless. A paperless office will go a long way toward keeping your home office clutter-free. 

Start by scanning all of the documents that you have now. It is going to take a while and needs to be scheduled so you can chip away at it. 

Then, use cloud storage to keep the documents safe and organized. In the future, avoid using any paper documents and go digital all the way. Even signatures can be done digitally now so there is no need to have paper copies for most things. 

3 – Create a storage system

Begin by labelling everything so that you know where everything should go. Then you should set up a section-by-section way of keeping things organized. Have containers for some things and shelves for others. 

Put things where you think they belong based on how often you will need to access them. This way you have things you need often right at hand and others can be put away someplace else. 

If you are struggling with ideas on how to organize yourself then you can head to your nearest Ikea. They have a lot of showrooms that are set up perfectly for small spaces so you simply need to go there and take some notes on how they use different products for the organisation. 

4 – Make it a habit

When you have a system for organizing then you’ll have an easier time tidying up since everything will have its place. Yet, you do still need to actually do it. Things won’t find their place on their own. 

This means that you’ll have to schedule a time every day to sort things out and deal with putting them where they belong. If you don’t schedule it then this is how things quickly get out of hand. 

When you schedule it and make it part of the work day then you are making sure that there won’t ever be any clutter that ends up becoming a project. 

5 – Upcycle, recycle and throw away

Chances are that a lot of the things cluttering up your office are no longer needed. These are items that have no place and you should get rid of them. Since one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, you can surely find a new home for some of the things taking up space by upcycling them. 

If there isn’t a taker for your old stuff then look into ways to recycle. Recycling electronics is a good way to help the environment and unload your obsolete gear.