Home Office Organizing: Setting Up A Command Center

My NYC home office organizing client may not be a corporate CEO, but has as many responsibilities as one.  She manages the household, oversees the schedules and activities of her husband and 4 children, is pursuing additional training and runs her own small business.

While she does have an office outside of her apartment, she really needed a home office so that even though she was working she could be available for deliveries and to address any household or family related matters promptly.  Our challenge was identifying an appropriate location within her home for her to use.  As it turned out, the best location for her home office was the little used desk in her college age daughter’s room.  As an added bonus, there are built in shelves and drawers above and adjacent to the desk and a storage cabinet underneath it.

We needed to implement some of my NYC office organizing best practices so that it would work for my client at all times – both when her daughter was away at school and home for vacation.  Since this technically needed to remain a shared space, we limited the number of shelves and drawers that we utilized for my client’s materials to those immediately above the desk and to only one next to the desk.  In addition, we re-located the items that were stored in the cabinet under the desk and used that space to store surplus office and organizing supplies.

All of the frequently used materials were gathered and stored in portable containers so that if my client’s daughter was home and the desk not accessible my client could temporarily set up shop with her laptop and key materials in another part of her home.  The standard collection of office supplies that are found on every desk were grouped together in decorative storage boxes and kept on the desktop.  In addition, her current Action and Reference Files were collected in portable file boxes and stored next to the desk.  We set up files for her class materials and collected them in their own wire mesh file box.

The systems that we set up are flexible and the NYC home office  organizing solutions that were implemented clearly address my client’s needs.  Thanksgiving will be our first opportunity to see how well this space works for all!