Home Small Desk Organization Ideas For Remote Workers
As the vaccination campaign is kicking off and the government is testing post-pandemic solutions to start life again, everyone is talking about remote work benefits. While some people wait to return to the office, others like me are quite happy to work from home. I think the key to be a good remote worker these days, is to find the work life balance everyone is talking about and being disciplined. Is all about how you structure your day. But also staying up to date with the latest remote work trends helps; these days there is so much information online on how to excel at working from home, is just a matter staying informed and applying the tips you get from remote work experts into your daily life. A good website for you to follow is Thinkremote, an excellent source of remote work news and insights.
But having a dedicated home desk, make me feel more productive, and helps me keep a healthier work-life balance.That’s when is clean and tidy. After months of quarantine, though, your desk will be a haven for almost everything: bills, insurance notices, random notes, your cat. Before you realize it, your home desk is the most significant source of distraction in the house. Ancient Romans used to say mens sana corpore sano. As a remote worker, you can translate this quote as ‘healthy mind, tidy desk.’
How To Organize A Small Desk at Home?
Organizing a small desk is hard. In small spaces, any time you leave something out of place, it suddenly becomes a mess. The first reaction is to put everything into boxes. But then, even finding a pen will become a treasure hunt. The point isn’t to make all the objects on the desk disappear. The aim is to put the things somewhere accessible to reach without the feeling of suffocating under your mess.
Take a deep breath before packing all your stuff to oblivion. Then, accept that organizing a desk requires time. And it’s nice to dedicate a day with music and good tea to do it.
That’s the first piece of advice: find a day to dedicate to your desk. Take it as an occasion to throw away old and unnecessary stuff. Then put everything you have on your desk on the floor and start categorizing. For example, electronics and cables go on the top right; legal docs and similar go down in the corner; and so on. Once you have an overview of what you have by categories, you can think about putting them back on the desk – hopefully, according to a logic that works for you.
Here are some tips to keep your small desk organized without filling up all the space around you!
Tips To Customize Your Home Desk When Working Remotely
1. Separate Workplace from Personal Space
Once you have the overview of what you have on your desk, it’s time to separate the workplace from personal life. For example, if you look for headphones right before a call, you don’t want to look at your next rent, or even worse, your veterinary bill. You want to stay focus on what you are doing and finish your task at a decent time.
Working remotely, your job will be mainly online. Still, you will look away from your monitor once in a while. If you are worried about the next round of taxes or the next appointment with the doctor, make sure to have that doc out of sign. Instead, you can put colorful paintings or prints on the wall. It will help you to relax by looking at them, without distracting you with daily concerns.
2. Find a Spot For Your Drinks
This piece of advice might sound weird, but you must be realistic. Working from home, you drink liters of tea and coffee every day. Where? Next to your laptop and electronics. Because that’s what you work with. And sooner or later, you will drop the coffee on your keyboard, or even worse, laptop. So find a safe spot for your drink. You can buy a small reclinable table to fit somewhere and take it out only for your drinks. Just make sure to keep liquids that live in an open cup far away from your laptop.
3. Maximize Under Desk Storage Solutions
A good way to maximize the space of a small desk is to rely on the space under the desk. As easy as that — that’s the best solution to optimize space. Find an item of storing furniture that fits with what you have and go wild with it. If you separate each drawer by specific categories (as you did on the floor), everything will be handy but out of the way.
As an alternative, you can get a hanging organizer to store extra office supplies. You can hang it on the door or somewhere handy next to your desk. With additional drawers and hanging spots, you can have everything you need around you and out of the way!
4. Keep A Drawer For Your Electronics and Cables
Save a drawer or a box for electronics and cables. You can even repurpose a utensil organizer to keep cables and plugs separated. Stored in a drawer, you can easily access your headphones when you have a video call or the cable to charge your phone. More importantly, you know where your extensions are instead of moving around everything to find a single cable.
5. Don’t Fill Up Your Walls
Don’t fill up your walls with shelves, boxes, and papers. If you aren’t a fan of organizers and time tracking apps, that’s fine. You can leave a spot on the wall with to-do lists and your monthly planning, but don’t go wild with it. If you see a ton of papers and tables with future tasks, anytime you look away from your monitor, you’ll soon feel overwhelmed.
6. Find A Place For Everything
Get creative with any solution you can find, but remember to find a place for everything. And remember to use some sort of logic to organize stuff. Leave at last what you don’t use very often. You can put a shelf on the top wall with spaces for archives and folders.
Just remember to leave room around you when you are working. Find a place for everything while leaving enough space for you to move around!
A Great Remote Job Begins With A Clean Desk
As we said initially, a tidy home desk is the first step to success for a remote worker. In the long run, an organized workplace will contribute to building a healthy work-life balance. Improving your home desk also means separating your personal life from your working hours. You can set a chunk of hours for work, sitting on your desk in front of your monitor. Once you’ve done and left your desk, your job is out of the mind.
Remote work has many benefits. But these benefits depend on your will and discipline. Find your working routine, tidy your home desk, and put your tech in place. That’s what you need to succeed and get the best from your remote job!
