Home Business Planning & Organization

Five Simple Ways on How to Have an Efficient Home Office Layout
This article written by J. Calbon at HubPages.com has five tips on how to have an organized and efficient home office layout. The first two tips talk about making a list of the regular activities being done in the home office and how to assess the equipment needed. The third and fourth tips explain how to make a layout plan and how to test it. The article suggests not buying anything yet, but instead to borrow them because it is for trial purposes only. The fifth and final tip is how to buy furniture and office equipment.

Home Office Design
In creating a home office, most people simply designate a space in the home, start bringing in equipment, unpack it and set it up. They then spend the next several years tripping over cords and stretching to reach things that they use every day. The problem? They took no time to actually sit down and design how best to use their home office space. In order to help you in designing your home office environment this article has links to half a dozen other articles which cover very specific areas of home office design, so you can choose those articles which appear most likely to help with your specific problems. Her suggested articles cover a wide range of designing needs, everything from organizing tips to safety tips to techniques for making your home office both functional and pleasant to work in no matter how small the space you have to work with. If you have a home office, you can almost certainly benefit from one or more of the articles in this list.

Setting Up Your Home Office
This article begins with a question: I want to set up a home office that will be used in the evenings and on weekend and to pay bills. What is the best set-up and how do I keep my paperwork organized? This seems to be the major concern of many people setting up their first home office. This article covers such things as proper furniture, proper lighting, filing systems and more. There are also several good pieces of advice such as The main thing to remember when creating and maintaining a home office is to set it up where you know it will be used, and then to be consistent with its use. There are also links to other recently answered questions and an article covering nothing but Home Office Organization.

A Filing System Workflow for Your Filing Cabinet
Your home office can be anything from a desk where you pay bills to a separate room in your house from which you run a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Regardless of the size and complexity of your home office, every home office has one thing in common: keeping organized. Organization starts with an assessment, and then a purge and shredding of unneeded paper. You also should consider candidates for Deep Storage. You need a filing cabinet large enough to accommodate the size of your business. Start by labeling the drawers of your filing cabinet. One drawer might be labeled Bills, another Documents, and one might even be labeled Miscellaneous. Label each folder as specifically as possible. This article suggests some of the following labels to help make your continuing organizing and up-dating of your paperwork easier: Unpaid Bills, and then a separate file for each of your major bills as they are paid, such as telephone, utilities, credit cards, etc. If possible have a separate drawer for Documents or Important Papers such as your mortgage or lease contract and other important papers for your home, medical insurance, warranties, auto loan papers, bank statements and the like. There are even suggestions for way to make your own unique and colorful "filing cabinets" if you can't afford or don't want the real thing. Organizing paperwork is the biggest problem many home officer owners report, so any help you can get in that area should be taken advantage of. This is one site you definitely need to take advantage of.

Bright Ideas for Home Office Lighting
One way to avoid uniform levels of lighting is to use indirect lighting sources. A fixture that reflects off of the ceiling back down into the space is the least glaring and most comforting for the eyes. If the area around your monitor is not well lit, there will be a contrast between the bright computer screen and the darkness of the room, which will certainly create eyestrain after awhile. To avoid this situation, try "washing" the wall behind your computer with a recessed "wall washer", a light fixture that looks like a regular light that would project light down the wall. Article also discusses paint choices for the home office, as well as halogen bulbs and general office décor and themes