Step 1: The Basic Setup
You have to assign a space in your house or apartment and actually call it the office or study. Not everybody can dedicate an entire room to books, documents and papers, so just cordon off an area, say a corner either in a bedroom, guestroom or dining room and call it your home office space.
In this space, you will need a table and chair (the most basic will do), on which you will keep your computer or laptop (almost everyone has one), a bookshelf and a filing cabinet. The bookshelf here is not for books only, per se, but for storing unused but important documents. The filing cabinet is for storing day to day paperwork, files and bills. You might as well get a filing cabinet with a couple of extra drawers to store stationary if your study table doesn’t have any.
Step 2: Day-to-Day Office
The filing cabinet is the focal point of current paperwork. This is where you should store all your incoming bills and documents. I suggest taking a professional office approach, like I do.
- Use hanging file folders as category folders in which you keep sub-category files. Confused? Don’t be! Here’s what I mean. Hanging folders should be named “Telephone and Utilities,?“Credit Cards and Bank Papers,?“Health and Insurance,?“Miscellaneous,?etc.
- Within these you store your sub-category Manila folders like “Cellphone Bills,?“Visa Card Bills,?“Insurance Receipts,?“Gas and Water,?“Travel Rewards,?etc, in the appropriate files. See how it easy it becomes to pop in the paperwork as soon as you have paid the bills? The minute you need to refer to an older bill or receipt (say to contest some unwanted charges) you have it literally at the tip of your fingers.
- Label everything neatly and corretly.
- You can also purchase a desktop tray to store all the paperwork which you still need to deal with and is not ready to file.
Step 3: Office Archives
We all have tons of documents that are rarely used or read but are super important and definitely need to be stored and archived. These may include your degrees, passport copies, various certificates, records, old utility bills, bank statements etc. There are two ways to go about storing these in the bookshelf I mentioned earlier.
Option A ?You can file them away in neatly labeled binders. For instance, “Vineeta’s bank statements 1995-1999.?Option B ?You can store them in Manila files stack in storage boxes. These boxes come as plain or fancy as you want, and you can keep dumping older files into boxes without the hassle of punching holes to put away in binders. Use some waterproof plastic folders to store really important documents.
Step 3: Everyday Accessories
There are a few things that you must always have in your home office drawers ready for your disposal when you need them.
Stapler and pins
Scissors
Cellotape
Masking tape
Pens
Pencils
Highlighter
Sticky notes
Paper clips and binder clips
Envelopes
Stamps
Glue
Hole punch (optional)
Printing paper (optional)
Memo/Writing pad for small notes
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