One nice thing about moving was getting all the stuff off my desk. Finally a reason to just throw all the stuff that somehow ended up on my desk into a box.

Most of it’s still there, so why is my desk cluttered again?

Mostly it’s paper, and I know who’s to blame. There’s a second grader in this house, and guess where all her school work ends up when she gets it back?

Ok, ok, I could give it back to her after I look at it. Blame it on me. Really. Just go ahead.

A little of the clutter has to do with bills received as I work toward making all our bills go on auto pay. Once all that’s settled I won’t have to worry about keeping track of who’s been paid.

And I suppose I can throw out the catalogs for the school fundraiser now that it’s over. No point in being tortured by those pictures of cookies anymore. The cookie dough will get here when it gets here, in late October.

I know I’m not the greatest at keeping paper clutter under control, but I do still have a few tips for managing it.

1. Have a safe place for bills that need to get paid.

Don’t let these get buried in the clutter. Put them someplace where you’ll find them in time to pay them. Get on auto pay if you like… I love it. Even pay them as soon as the bills come in if that’s what it takes. Just don’t lose track of any of your bills.

2. Have a safe place for checks that need to be cashed.

Motivation to get these taken care of quickly should be even greater than that for paying bills. But sometimes checks sit a little until I can make it to the bank. Giving them a safe place to sit ensures that I don’t lose any and need to ask for them to be reissued.

3. Give it back.

I’m not so good at this one, as I noted above. I really need to give my daughter the chance right away to decide if her school work is kept or recycled.

We don’t have it up yet, but we have enough wall space here that we’re planning on putting up a board for each kid to put up their favorite artwork and school work. Gives them a place to show off rather than leaving it buried for all time. At least until the boards fill up, as they will.

4. Make friends with the recycle bin.

I just need to get faster about this one. Papers need to go more quickly into the recycle bin than I tend to send them. My desk wouldn’t be half so cluttered if I would make a quick decision as papers come along.

5. Get it filed.

I put this last because really, there aren’t that many papers coming in that I need to keep in a file. Doing that means it will probably stick around FOREVER. Move after move after move. There aren’t that many papers that really need to be kept.

Business records, financial records, important school papers, yes. Every little message from the school, no. You know the stuff you want to keep.

Maybe eventually I’ll be better about keeping the paper to a minimum on my desk. For now all I can do is keep on trying.

At least my habits in this area can’t get much worse. Well, they could, but that would be quite the disaster.

Many people who work at home don’t really have a good space for it. Not all homes have enough room for a separate home office, but having a dedicated work space makes a big difference.

If your business is primarily or entirely online, the main thing you need is your computer and desk. If this can be separate from what the rest of the family uses, that’s a big step. There are few things more frustrating than having to sort out conflicting priorities that keep you entirely from working. But the kids need the computer for their homework and what do you do but give it up?

That’s why you need your own if at all possible.

A space to work on your business also makes it easier for you to set rules about when you are working. Even if you aren’t in a separate room you can set rules about what the kids can and cannot bother you with while you work.

The biggest challenge comes in when you can’t claim a separate space directly and you have to set up your home office in a shared area, maybe even a shared computer. You have to be able to do something.

My own office is somewhat shared. My own computer, desk shared (big desk). Much of my work time is with either one of the kids or my husband on the other computer. It makes for a bit more a challenge when working.

With this little space I keep a part of the desk and a file cabinet to my work. As I do work entirely online, my needs in terms of space are relatively few. Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with home offices is that they are often a mess. In my experience it is easy to feel like it is more important to work than to straighten up my office. There are just so many more things I could be doing and they seem more profitable than handling the inevitable clutter.

But the time always comes when the job must be done. I have to clean my home office. And so I will share my tips for it with you.

Papers are one of the worst items for cluttering an office. It doesn’t matter if you do your business 100% online, somehow paper appears anyhow. Check stubs, random stuff you’ve printed, mail someone else dropped in your office for some unknown reason. And it just tends to sit, unfiled or not in the trash can.

As you can guess, the first step is to sort through all those papers sitting on your desk or elsewhere in your office. If you don’t have a good filing system set up, make one! There will come a time when you will need one or another piece of paperwork, and if it is filed you will have a much easier time finding it. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping your home life and your professional life separate when you work at home can be a real challenge. If you fail to set enough boundaries, your work life can run right over your home life, leaving you feeling pressured to keep working and unable to enjoy the time with your family you would like to have.

Depending on the age of your children, there are many things you can do to make working at home a little easier to keep apart from the rest of your life. If you can spare the space and equipment to set things up separately you can make things much easier to keep apart.

A dedicated work space is perhaps the most important item. You need somewhere that you can get work done with minimal interference. Ideally, this means a room you can close off to use as your home office, but not everyone has a room available for a home office.

You’ll need rules about your office. Can the kids interrupt you freely? Can you have younger ones bring in toys to play quietly so you can work while still supervising them?

A separate work computer once again is ideal but not achievable for everyone. A work computer allows you to have a machine that you don’t have to compete with anyone else to use. If you need to keep files confidential it is much easier to do so on a private machine than one shared with your family. Read the rest of this entry »

A home office of one sort or another is a vital part of working at home. Some people manage to have an entirely separate room for their home office. Mine is a more or less dedicated room… unless you count all the kids’ toys right behind my chair, on my desk, under my feet…

It’s hard to keep kids out of the home office, especially when it doesn’t have a door. I’m not really sure what to call the room my office is in. It’s just off the dining area, but there’s no doorway as such; the spaces are open to each other aside from a wall less than two feet long.

Life has definitely become easier in many ways since we got a second computer. My son is too young to understand computers, but he sure likes to scroll around Google Earth. My daughter loves to play games on Noggin and similar sites. Letting the kids use the other computer gives me more time to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Clutter happens. For most people it’s a constant battle to keep their lives from getting too cluttered, and when you work at home you have all too much time to create clutter and what seems like too little time to take care of it.

Planning ahead can be a big help. If you have a place for everything that belongs in your home office, it is only a matter of building good habits to decrease your clutter. Putting things where they belong immediately is a good first step.

But first you have to break free of clutter. This means setting aside the time to take care of it. Don’t do a halfway job – you’ll just have to repeat it later. Take the time to plan things out first. Figure out where your problem areas are and how you can solve the problems.

Try organizing things by the task they belong to. If everything for a particular task is in one place, you’ll have a much easier time taking care of things. You want everything to be easy to get at later, not just easy to put away.

Be logical when you’re filing your papers. Certainly you can go the old route of filing things alphabetically, but might it be easier to file by category? Financial, family, insurance, taxes and so forth?

You don’t have to finish organizing your home office in a single day. You should, however, try to do it fairly quickly so that you don’t get frustrated and quit using the system you’ve already developed.

[tags]organizing,filing,clutter,home office organization[/tags]

Feels good to be able to work again easily. I spilled water on my keyboard the other day, and the letter c, the number 2 and the “Home” key all quit working. There’s only so much you can do without all the keys working.

I got some work done using right click to copy and paste. This allowed me to type anything I wanted, so long as I kept a page open where those characters were.

There’s one very simple thing I love about shopping at Office Depot. They’re just down the street from me, which means that if I place an order over $50 online they will deliver it free the next business day. Very useful.

My keyboard is the Microsoft(R) Natural(R) Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I love it. Office Depot was selling it for $49.99, but fortunately I needed some paper anyhow, which made reaching the minimum order quite painless. Sitting around waiting for the order was no fun, but that’s just life.

It was kind of painful having to get a new keyboard when my current one was barely six months old, but that is what I get for drinking water at my desk. I was so hopeful that it would be ok in the morning after drying out, but not this time.

I was quite please with Office Depot’s pricing. Amazon was charging $49.95 for the same keyboard, but to get mine sooner with no delivery charge and no driving around town looking for the right keyboard I wasn’t going to complain about 4 cents.

Office Depot…Free Delivery on Orders Over $50 in Select Trading Areas.

Here’s one of those bills that has just been sitting in Congress too long that really needs to get passed…. hopefully without too much nonsense added to it.

The Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act prevents states from charging income tax on people who are telecommuting and living in a different state. These people already pay income tax in their home state, but states such as New York say that if the employer is within their state lines, the employee must pay them income tax too. This is clearly an unfair double taxation on telecommuters.

I have no idea how effective this website is, but you can go to Petition Online and sign a petition encouraging your representatives to pass this Act. It was introduced last May and is still just sitting there, so hopefully a little push will move things along. I have no idea how long these things normally take, but I would guess this is about average.

You can keep an eye on the progress of the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act by visiting THOMAS, which is run by the Library of Congress. Great place to keep an eye on anything going through Congress or the Senate that you find interesting.

It’s so nice having a good quality keyboard and mouse rather than the ones that came with my new computer. I’m a big fan of good ergonomics (having had to take regular classes on the topic when I worked at the phone company), and the right equipment really helps.

I can type better too now that I’ve gotten used to my new keyboard. It’s the Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000. I got used to the Natural style keyboards from Microsoft, and honestly it is now hard to use anything else. It puts my hands and wrists in a much more natural position. I took off the front riser because the keyboard barely slides under my desk on my keyboard tray with it on. There are times where I’m typing with my hands under the desk (never long, it isn’t comfortable), such as when Gage is trying to type with me and I can’t let him do that.

The mouse is a Logitech Trackman Wheel Optical. My husband got me hooked on this kind of mouse. Rather than rolling all around your desk, your thumb moves the trackball around. This is very comfortable, although for new users you may find your thumb is sore for a few days as you get used to it. But once you’re used to it you are likely to prefer it.

It’s so nice to have these last little bits of my computer here and set up. It took a couple days to get my speed back on the keyboard, but now that I’m used to the slight changes from this keyboard from my old Natural, I think I prefer it. It’s actually hard for me to type on a plain keyboard these days.