Home Office Organisation: How to set up a ‘mindful’ filing system

8 tips for organising workflow in your home office setup

Wellbeing and mindfulness are both terms you have probably heard of a fair bit over the last few months. With everything that has happened in the past year, it’s something we should encourage in our home office set up. Creating a productive workspace is important from both a design aspect but also to assist with day to day motivation. After all, it should make for common sense – the more clutter-free and spacious your workspace is, the better your mindset. Getting your home office set up is one thing but it is also essential to set up a workflow system.

Organising your home office

Regardless of whether you have a digital or a physical ‘filing’ system, storage should be at the forefront when it comes to workflow organisation. If your desk looks like the below – then you may need to re-assess your set up!

Photo credit by Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash

Being stressed, having a lot of pressure or a high workload make most of us choose to ‘deal with that later’. Fight or flight we always run to the most needed activity first or the loudest one. But not having a set organised space, can not only potentially increase the possibility of burnout but can make you miss tasks that are just as important. Furthermore, lack of a ‘filing system’ (be it a digital or physical one) means you’re missing out on ‘archiving’ and finishing tasks properly. Something that is essential from a mindfulness and empowerment point of view. A great structure starts with a place to file In progress tasks, and completed tasks.

Overall we feel being able to ‘complete’ or archive a job allows you to finish the day with a tick in a box. As a result, perhaps in turn it can help you close of day to day and return from the office with a good mindset and a clear path.

Here’s a few of our favourite ‘workflow filing’ Home Office Organisation Ideas

• Take a good break within your work day (a walk around the block, reading a book – it is important for us all to rest and recuperate so that you can pick up with focus through the rest of the day.
• Clear out a filing cabinet – or purchase a new fresh 2 Drawer File cabinet (If a filing cabinet takes up to much space – consider an under desk pedestal) Separate your work load into a draw process :

1.  In Progress
2.  Awaiting Confirmation / On Hold
3.  Archived / Complete

(If you have a 4 draw filing cabinet or storage system – you could potentially utilise the top 1st drawer as New In)

Home Office Organisation – Workflow Filing Tips

1. Once you have a filing cabinet set up, remove everything off your desk. Place any paperwork within the 3 draws depending on their status.
2. As a rule of thumb – paperwork should only be on the desk if it is active and being worked on there and then
3. Most of us use digital organisation also, so it’s worth setting up this same practice online so you have both filing systems working together. A favourite digital organization tool for us is Trello. You can utilise trello in a similar manner so that you can productivity organise and stay on top of tasks both in digital format and paper format.
4. Use filing tabs to separate the ‘In Progress’ draw.
5. By separating your In progress draw you can organise your work into “Next Up”, “Tomorrow”, “New In”.
6. Encourage your workflow set up by setting a position in regards to paperwork, the closest to the front the most actionable, the furthest at the back – the newest to be attended to later.
7. If you do have a 4 draw cabinet,  you may prefer to also have the Archived / Complete draw to house Client files or potentially have the last draw as Client set archives. That way – if you’re looking for information in regards to a particular client set up, it is much easier to navigate. Try out some colours filing tabs to help archive client archives
8. Last but not least – at the end of your working day, file away any leftover paper work or tasks so that you come in refreshed for the next day.

Oh and yes – please if you do find after reading this you have decided to put a new workflow in place to organise your workspace – we would love to see your set up and ideas!