Keep Your Home Office Clean by Setting a Cleaning Schedule
Working from home is fantastic in many ways. Working alone at home can make things like lunch breaks and the clothes you wear quite flexible. It can also be a bit of an optional cleanup of your space, so optional in some cases that you don’t have to. Nobody will see your home office, right?
In early 2019, after actively implementing this “additional” cleaning option, my personal home office reached a pretty disastrous point. I spent a few days cleaning and then put myself on a yearly cleaning schedule. If you work from home, I recommend that you do the same.
And if your home office is always clean, I take off my hat to you. This tip is not for you.
As with any large task, cleaning is much easier if you break it down into smaller pieces. Cleaning up annual junk, mailing notes, unsent receipts, and other junk is a huge task. The daily division of cases made things much easier and ensured that my home office was always accessible to visitors throughout the year. It also had the added bonus of being able to always find whatever I needed when I needed it (miracle!).
As for how to arrange cleaning, it depends a little on your personal situation. One of the biggest problems is packages. I get a ton of products mailed to me for review, which is great, but all of these products come in cardboard boxes with lots of packaging. I also live in a pedestrianized area on the third floor, so recycling these crates takes a bit of work. It also requires me to go to the trash can before everyone else in my building so there is actually room for my trash.
Our recycling starts on Tuesday, so I now have an alert every Wednesday at lunchtime asking me to take the recycling down to the already empty bin. It’s a small thing, but it meant amazing things in terms of limiting congestion in my office. I used to think of Mondays all the time, which is great, but there really wasn’t a place to put the recycling in the bin, so I would be SOL. Now I put my things there first.
Mail is another thing I was horrible with, now I have a warning to handle this on Fridays. I go through the huge pile on my desk, pay all the bills that need to be paid, and jot down or throw away the rest. Again, a little thing when you do it regularly, a dumpster when you skip it for a week or two, or let your junk mail accumulate. I can’t say how many times I looked for that letter that was “somewhere”. The answer always lay in a heap, which I unloaded from the table onto the floor.
I also have warnings reminding me to vacuum every few weeks and tidy up my desk space, and yes, one suggests taking out the trash might be a good idea.
If you’re having a hard time keeping your home office (or any room in your home) clean, one good deep cleaning and then a cleaning schedule for the parts you’re struggling with (I’m using Google calendar alerts) could ensure your 2020 success. …