When Your Home is Your Workplace
By Barbara Hemphill
Certainly organizing any household can be difficult, but
when your home is also your office, the challenge can be
overwhelming. Statistics show there are more than 25 million
income-generating home offices in the U.S., and the number is
growing.
As someone who has worked from a home office for over 20
years and a mother with five grown children, I’ve undoubtedly
made every mistake possible. The joy and flexibility of
working at home can quickly turn your house into a prison
unless you take some preventive measures. Consider these tips
to make living and working at home less stressful and more
productive:
1. Position your office location carefully. If at all
possible, separate your workplace from your living space, so
you can physically leave your work. If you’re working at home
in order to take care of children, consider hiring childcare
while you work – studies show your work productivity (and
potential for profit) will increase, and so will the quality
of life for your children.
2. Continually eliminate clutter. For years I have fought
the myth that being organized means being a neatnik. When you
remove the old batteries, loose change, dried-up pens, keys to
unknown places, expired coupons, and postage stamps of strange
denominations from the kitchen junk drawer, what you have left
is useful. If there’s a paperclip mixed in with the keys, it
doesn’t really matter. You can organize it more – and it will
be easier to keep organized if you do, but it isn’t a
necessity. Clutter is frequently excess, and excess cannot be
organized!
3. Choose a calendar system that works for you. If you’re
working at home, chances are it’s difficult to tell when
business ends and home begins – so you’ll probably want a
calendar or planner system that encompasses both your personal
and professional life. In addition, create a method for
sharing information that all the family needs to know. It may
be something as simple as a calendar on the refrigerator with
a different color pen for each member of the family.
4. Develop a system for meals to suit your style. The need
to eat can create chaos or increase quality of life, depending
upon how you approach it. I used to think that because I was a
professional organizing consultant, I should have all my meals
for the week planned by Sunday night. I soon discovered that
even though my meal plan said it was spaghetti night, I wasn’t
in the mood. Now, I keep lots of staples on hand so I can
create something delightful with the perishables I bought over
the weekend.
5. Create separate filing systems for your personal life
and professional life. Research shows that the average person
spends 150 hours per year looking for misplaced information.
And, certainly nothing creates a family crisis faster than a
15-year- old who needs a copy of his birth certificate to get
into driver’s Ed training, and you can’t find it! If it fits
in a file, put it there – and keep a list of your files,
called a File Index – so you, or someone else, can find it
when needed. (Kiplinger’s Taming the Paper Tiger software
creates the index automatically, and allows you to find
anything you file or store in five seconds or less.
6. Get enough sleep. According to sleep experts, in order
to be fully productive, you need to spend one-third of your
life in bed. Many of us say, “I don’t have time to sleep” –
but research shows we can’t afford to continually deprive
ourselves and others who suffer because of our sleep
deprivation. Sleep provides power to energize the body and the
mind. Dr. James B. Maas, author of Power Sleep says that if
you fall asleep immediately when your head hits the pillow or
need an alarm clock to wake up, you need more sleep! (And you
may solve a problem while you’re doing it!)
7. Eliminate perfectionism. Someone once told me “A
perfectionist is someone who takes great pains and gives them
to everyone else.” If you want to make yourself and the others
around you miserable, insist on perfectionism. I have always
found it fascinating that the most disorganized people in the
world frequently have pockets of perfectionism – spices in
alphabetical order in a cupboard over a counter where there’s
no room to cook. Productivity is about progress, not
perfectionism!
If you’re working at home, or thinking about it, remember
that “home is where the heart is” – and it can be a great
place to make a living too!
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