Decluttering My Home Office Storage Closet

Upcoming moves, renovation projects or change of season provide the perfect opportunity for tackling the clutter that has collected. Whether it is April or October, your office or your home or both, scheduling time to weed out those items that are no longer used is time well spent.

Here’s how this NYC professional office organizer tackled her own decluttering project. Before our recent apartment renovation project started last fall, I did a thorough sweep of my home office storage closet as well as all our closets and cabinets. The 3 extra staplers and 4 desktop file organizers which were stashed on the very top shelf of the storage closet quickly joined the waffle maker in the donation bag. This was a case of sight out of mind as these office supplies had been stored on the very top shelf of my office closet. In the process, I was both home office organizing client and NYC professional office organizer as I grappled with whether, or not I really needed to keep these items plus the 4 binders that had been sitting on a lower shelf forever. Fortunately, the home office organizer in me asked the right questions and was very persuasive. I quickly and successfully parted with all the excess office supplies that were cluttering up the shelves in the closet.

Anyone looking inside the closet before my decluttering blitz would have seen the contents neatly organized (of course!) and assumed that no further organizing was required. After all, I had the space for the surplus supplies and hadn’t needed it for other more essential items. However, due to the renovation project, I was going to need space to store promotional postcards, file folders, and hanging folders in the office closet. In addition, I was going to move
much of the closet contents into storage as it would be in the way during construction and I didn’t want to pay to store stuff that wasn’t being used.

To ensure that the decluttering was completed before the renovation started, I scheduled short, focused blocks of time to review the contents of all my closets and cabinets. As I didn’t have a lot of time to declutter, I made sure to be ruthless when assessing the items in each location so that I could get the job done quickly. Once I finished the decluttering in each spot, I assessed the contents on each shelf or in each closet being sure that those items that were
frequently used would have a very accessible home once the renovation was completed.

I urge you to schedule in some office decluttering time this spring as you’ll more efficiently use your space as a result. For more hands-on home office organizing tips and strategies, you can reach out to me here.