How to Organize your Home Office

AJ Vickery: For those of you who don’t know, the third week in October is Small Business Week and different activities are going to take place on different days. On Thursday of that week, we’re going to celebrate “Organize Your Desk Day,” but we thought we’d explore that a little further today by bringing in organizational expert. So today, we’re introducing, Christa Wagner from Savvy Solutions. Christa Wagner: Hi there. AJ Vickery: Thanks for joining us. Christa Wagner: Thank you. AJ Vickery: And you are an expert in sort of helping people get organized. Christa Wagner: Absolutely. AJ Vickery: Do you find a lot of businesses need that? Christa Wagner: I do, employees spend about an hour each day searching from misplaced information. So that’s a big number, when you crunch all the number of employees that you have, times the number of weeks, the number of months that you work per year, it is a big number and all of a sudden, organizing and productivity becomes tremendously important to the bottom line. AJ Vickery: And that’s for the business and not just for the help to the individual, but even for the business, you’re going to save money. Christa Wagner: Absolutely. AJ Vickery: Our producers have gone out and they’ve look in our inbox questions and found—we actually had a viewer write to us, it’s Scott Gibson, and he wrote, “Dear Get Connected, My name is Scott and I’m a call centre manager and also a part-time student. Keeping my office organized is a real challenge, can you help me please? So what we’re thinking is that we would actually go out to Scott’s house and give his small office a makeover. Christa Wagner: Sounds great. AJ Vickery: Are you up for that? Christa Wagner: Absolutely. AJ Vickery: Okay, let’s go and check it out. Christa Wagner: Let’s go. Here we are. AJ Vickery: I hope it’s the right place. Christa Wagner: I know. Scott Gibson: Hi. AJ Vickery: Hi, Scott? Scott Gibson: Yes. AJ Vickery: Hi, I’m AJ from Get Connected, you probably recognize me. Scott Gibson: Yes. AJ Vickery: This is Christa Wagner from Savvy Solutions. She’s an expert ion organizing office-based. Now you wrote to us and said that you had a messy office, still messy? Scott Gibson: Yes it is. AJ Vickery: Alright, well, we’re going to help you get it cleaned up. Scott Gibson: Great, come on in. AJ Vickery: Okay, after you. Christa Wagner: Okay, let’s get started. AJ Vickery: So this is where you work? Scott Gibson: Yes. AJ Vickery: And it’s actually quite a beautiful room Scott Gibson: Thank you. AJ Vickery: But it is a little bit messy. And so, what do you think? Christa Wagner: Well, I think we have a lot of work that we can do here, I can tell already Scott that just by looking at your desk and by looking at your office that you’re really busy and have a lot of activities. AJ Vickery: Which is a good thing. Christa Wagner: Which is a great thing, but what we want to do is take the space and for it to support you and support all of those activities. I think we should open up the window and open up the blinds and let some light in, when I first walked in to the room, one of the first thing that is that there isn’t much light in here. The other thing that I see is there is no drawers to this desk, so we have to find a home for some of these things like the tape and the batteries and some of the extra odds and ins, so that you have a place to put them at the end of the day. My guess is that some of the tools that you have surrounding the desk like the rock band here— AJ Vickery: You can’t touch the rock band. Christa Wagner: I know, and the guitar. I'm not going to touch it. I’m not going to take it away. But it might not need to be right here at your desktop because this is where we want to be the most productive. AJ Vickery: What do you say, you and I get out of here and we’ll come back in a little while and see what we did. Scott Gibson: Sounds good. Christa Wagner: I’m going to get started. Scott Gibson: Well I'm off going through email. I'm doing a lot of printing. I send faxes and I take conference calls as well. With those activities, it’s just been made a lit bit more clutter in that space and a little bit harder to arrange, because I'm going back to school, I’m doing a lot of studying there, so a lot of books open and a lot of reading. AJ Vickery: Yeah, how many hours would you say, you use that space for. Scott Gibson: Usually between 10 and 15 hours a week. I don’t have a whole lot of time to organize that area and I haven’t had a lot of time for filing. So anything she can do to help me, it’ll be appreciated. AJ Vickery: What do you do to keep track of things like important notes? Scott Gibson: Normally, I keep those things close to my monitor. The problem is that they can pile up over time. So that’s something that’s been difficult for me to organize myself. AJ Vickery: So I would want to lose the rock band, how do you feel about that? Scott Gibson: Oh that’s fine, if we can get that space to be more that office space, that would be better for me and my work environment. AJ Vickery: Are you excited about the changes? Scott Gibson: I sure am. AJ Vickery: Are you ready to check it out? Scott Gibson: You bet. AJ Vickery: Let’s go see what she’s done. Scott Gibson: Sounds good. AJ Vickery: So I’ve got Scott’s eye close here. We’re going to set him up right about here and do the revealing, in the count of three, you can open up your eyes. Scott Gibson: Oh wow! Fantastic. AJ Vickery: Quite of a different, aye? Scott Gibson: Look at that. AJ Vickery: Tell us what you did? Christa Wagner: Well, great. I’m so glad that I’ve got Scott. We had a ton of fun working in here today, and basically what we’ve been able to do is we’ve maximized your office space. We have removed the excess that we didn’t need. We’ve added some lighting and we’ve given you some great organizing tools that are going to go a long way for you and your family. Scott Gibson: Awesome. Christa Wagner: We have been able to utilize— AJ Vickery: We’d step in there and check that out a little bit. Christa Wagner: Yeah—a keyboard platform. Scott Wagner: That is fantastic. Christa Wagner: So we know that you do a lot of research and take calls here in the desk, but you need space for your paper and to write and so this will be nice to have your keyboard down here. AJ Vickery: And the cool thing about that keyboard—that’s a Kensington combination so you actually have a few little extra things here too, if you look at the top of those keyboards, it actually has a USB charger connection and also an adaptor where you can actually charge your cell phone—that’s pretty cool? Scott Gibson: Wow, awesome. Christa Wagner: The other great thing is that we have a wireless mouse, so we’ve taken care of a lot of your wires and you can’t see them anymore, but this is even better because there’s no wire and whatsoever. We also installed a monitor arm for you, again trying to maximize your desk space. The other thing that we’ve installed here on your wall, a whiteboard calendar, the best thing about the whiteboard calendar is that there’s no tossing or changing of the calendar at the end of each month or at the end of the year, you just wipe it clean every month and you put up your new dates and your new tasks and activities, so it’s a great way to go. AJ Vickery: The thing that I liked too about this one is that it’s from Quartet, it’s a magnetic board in addition, so it’s a whiteboard. But also, you can put some magnets on it. Christa Wagner: Another tool that we have here for you is a simple tool but a really effective one. We have a stapler. I noticed a lot of paperwork that belong together, but wasn’t connected in anyway. So, instead of it being all over the desktop, you can simply just staple them. Another great tool and one of my favorites is the shredder. AJ Vickery: Oh, I love shredders. Christa Wagner: I love shredders too. And this is a great one. A lot of people are worried about identity theft, this is a great way to nip that problem. Scott Gibson: Perfect. AJ Vickery: So what do you think? Scott Gibson: This is fantastic. AJ Vickery: Why don’t you take a seat and take it for a test drive. Sit comfortable there. If you are wondering what happened to all the papers that were on your desk, we sort of put them in a little bit of order, we stapled a few things together and also have it set up with a couple if different binders. So we’ve got a three-hole punch, the stapler that are both from Swing Line, and again it’s just a great way to get stuff organized, put it in the binder and you can start filing it as well. Scott Gibson: Very nice. AJ Vickery: Scott, thank so much for letting us come in today and do this exercise to organize your office space. Scott Gibson: Oh, you’re welcome and thank you both so much for your help, I appreciate it. Christa Wagner: Thank you, it was our pleasure. AJ Vickery: Thank you Christa, from Savvy Solutions, what a fantastic job you did. It’s surprising, the few tools what you’ve turned this space into. Christa Wagner: Well, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me. This has been great. AJ Vickery: And for those of you at home, don’t forget that the third week in October is small business week and we’re showing you some great tips today on how to get your office organized. If you got an inbox question, be sure to email us because you never know, we might end up on your doorstep. So we check out some of these new tools here? Scott Gibson: Absolutely. AJ Vickery: Pass me that rubber ball over there, that’s what I’ve had my eye on. Look at that.