My Organized Biz

When Miranda emailed me about her office, she summed it up with this comment: “…it seems like there’s just too much to cram into the six foot area that I like.”

Miranda, when I look at your photo, “cluttered” is not the word that comes to mind. You’re bring super creative with the space you’ve got with all the plastic bins and shelving. However, you do have an issue that makes your space more prone to clutter: insufficient storage.

The basic theory is this: If there’s a place for things to go, they don’t pile up. If there isn’t, they do. So here are 3 suggestions to increase your storage capacity – which, in turn, will make the extra bits you’ve got floating around disappear.

Suggestion 1: Print elsewhere

Even though your desk measures 6′ long, you actually have about 1.5 square feet of work space on your desk. Not a lot.

By moving the printer, you’ll gain a ton of space that you can store current projects that you need to access multiple times during the day. I’m guessing you don’t use the printer quite that often.

Where do you put it? That’s the next point…

Suggestion 2: Get a dog leg

I don’t know how many hours per day you’re at your desk, but since you blog I’m guessing its a lot. Dear Miranda, this desk you’ve got isn’t worthy of your hard work. It’s too high for you (Maggie had this issue last week, too) and it’s also not big enough.

I’d love to see you with a desk that has some drawers within arm’s reach and a file drawer or two. That would give all the little things under your monitor a place to go. You’d also get an actual surface to work on rather than that tiny 8.5×11″ square.

If a shiny new desk isn’t in the budget (I recommend Ikea for great value), at least get another table and put it on the right side along the wall at a 90* angle. An L-shaped (dog leg) workspace will give you more surface area to store lots of things and a place to put the printer off at the end.

Suggestion 3: Oh, give them a home…

You’ve got some great projects (article ideas) and short-term storage needs (bills) – and you said they’re piling up. So let’s give them a place to live so they won’t.

I’d love to see you hang some shelves over your desk so that you can put some books up and add some project boxes. These provide loose storage (but organized enough) and give assorted papers a place that’s easy to access. Best of all, it gets them off your desk.

For your article ideas, you could also assign a folder as your “article garden” and just drop idea in there when you get. Whatever you do, vertical is better than horizontal when it comes to storage. So be on the lookout for ways you’d want to store things short-term.

Summary: Give yourself more space and start thinking creatively about how you want to store your projects. I know I’ve evaded your question about clutter, but I think this is more on target for what you need.

Thnaks for playing, Miranda!

If you’d like a Wednesday Makeover with 3 suggestions for your office, read how.

What do you think?

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