20 Things to do for a Decluttered Home Office

Organizing

Sep 23

20 Things to do for a Decluttered Home Office Main Image copy.png

Today I wanted to share with you 20 tasks that will help you do a thorough clean up and reorganization of not just your physical office, but also the digital components of your workspace.

Your goal should be to spend about 15 minutes decluttering per day.

This might not be enough time to completely finish the task, but it will certainly eliminate some of the clutter.

For example, if you have thousands of emails in your inbox, you probably won’t be able to get the number down to below 100 in 15 minutes. However, you can get a good start and schedule time every day until it’s done.

If you’re not crunched for time, you can spend as much time as it takes to completely finish the task for that day.

Pick a day to start decluttering and just keep going until you’ve completed all twenty tasks.

If it takes you a few extra days, that’s fine. The important thing is that you finish.

Your home office will be in much better shape and you’ll feel great about what you’ve accomplished!

Getting Started:

There are two activities to complete before you start decluttering:

Take photos of the physical state of your office now so you can compare it after decluttering.
Walk around your office and make notes about what needs to be recycled, repaired, or kept.

20 Things to do for a Decluttered Home Office

20 Decluttering Tasks…

Get your email inbox down to below 100 messages.
Unsubscribe from email accounts you are no longer interested in.
Rethink your office space and decide what needs to change.
Order/buy shelves* and other storage appropriate to your needs.
Arrange to have your office deep cleaned.
Have broken things repaired.
Run a disk clean up tool to find and wipe unneeded files. There are built-in tools on both Mac and PC.
Delete large files from your computer e.g. movies you’ve watched, audio tracks, photos, etc.
Delete old files you know you won’t need anymore.
Check and clear your voice assistant history if you have Alexa*, Siri, or Google Assistant.
Deactivate unused online accounts that you no longer use.
Check your virus scanner and security protections are up to date and run a performance scan on your computer to remove threats.
Sign up for a cloud storage service for digitized documents and start moving essential data to the cloud e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3.
Delete photos, memes, gifs, etc. you don’t want to keep and put those you do on the cloud.
Make a list of all your outstanding business tasks. Get them out of your head and onto paper.
Look at your list of tasks and ask yourself ‘do I still need to do this?’ and if no, cross it off your list.
Look again at your list of tasks and take immediate action on quick things. Then cross them off your list.
Label physical storage clearly so you can see at a glance where everything is e.g. boxes, cabinets, drawers, etc.
Bring in some color, plants, and paintings to brighten up your space and reflect your personality.
Take another photo and compare how your office looks now to your before photo.