Have you ever been to an office where there was virtually no room to work? With scarcely any space to move between furniture, where you bump into your co-workers when you push your chair back. In addition there might be piles of paper on the desk with nowhere to go other than a faraway filing cabinet, so the only practical option is to keep everything nearby. Does this sound familiar?

There are a number of classic ‘mistakes’ that office designers tend to make and that render life in that office more difficult than it absolutely has to be. Let’s take a look at common issues.

Working from a home office certainly has its charms: being near home, being able to take care of someone in between working bouts, not having to commute on a daily basis… who wouldn’t want that? However, there are drawbacks to working from home as well. You might be distracted by your home life to a much larger degree than if you were working away from home. You might find that it’s not simple to be removed from your colleagues and having to bear with a huge level of remote communication, lacking the personal contact with them.

While you cannot easily overcome being removed from your colleagues, there are certain things you can do to remove some of the distractions by making sure to create clear boundaries between home and work.

And we are back at the home office front! While it is important to deal with incoming paperwork and materials (and I have written about this more than once in the past), don’t forget to take care of things AFTER they have come in and have been dealt with.

In many ways, a home office has a lot of similarities with a corporate office or an office behind a store, but there are other things than work-related paperwork that live in your office space and those need to be stored away in some fashion as well.

Offices contain a lot of paperwork of all kinds, but also a lot of other things that may vary in shapes and sizes: catalogues of all sorts, customer handouts, testers, give-aways, spare parts, office supplies, often also food and drinks, maybe a kettle or coffee maker, etc.

All these items have one thing in common: they take up space and have to be pretty accessible at all times to fulfil their purpose. Storing them properly and in an easy to find manner is paramount to save time.

I often hear customers tell me that their homes are cluttered simply because they have no storage and need better organization tools. And while some homes actually may be very low on storage to start with, I have reason to believe that too much storage actually leads to even more stuff coming into our homes (and offices!).

We are being told on many occasions that it’s all about storage, but really it’s about understanding what is necessary and serves us, and letting go of those things that fall under neither of those two categories.

There are a lot of different aspects to clutter: how we are affected by it, how it appears in our homes, how we deal with it, etc. But one particular aspect that is often shushed over is a very simple one: clutter costs us dearly in terms of money and time.

How so, you might ask? Well, just think about the way we have to deal with every single item in our lives, how they come into our homes, where they end up, how we relate to them and how we ultimately struggle to let go of them…

Last week we looked at the issue of separating your work from your free time. I hate to employ the term work/life balance as it assumes that they are separate things, while I believe that they can easily be intertwined and most often are.

We still live in a world where a lot of people believe in that distinction, especially if they want to climb the career ladder all the way to the top of the company they work for, of if they want to make their own company the biggest and best of them all. However, while work can be a way of life, it can also overwhelm someone to a point where they stop living their lives at all.

In the distant past, people were happy to bring in a specialist to fix the pipes, to paint walls, to do all kind of small things around the house. These days, we are more likely to do things ourselves: to save money, of course, but also because it has become very fashionable to Do It Yourself.

While that is a nice thing and can lead to all kinds of savings, funny and dramatic moments in the home and near-miss nervous breakdowns experienced by the clumsy and the anxious alike, DIY is also another perfect way to add to the clutter we accumulate.

Let’s look at the clutter fallout from DIY, then.

One of the biggest challenges in terms of balancing work and free time properly is the issue of switching gears. We want to be fully engaged in work when we are at work, but fully engaged with ourselves, our friends and family, hobbies and other activities when we are not. Likewise, our private lives usually take lowest priority when we are at work, and work takes the back seat when we are enjoying our free time.

That sounds pretty self-explanatory, but sadly a lot of people can’t seem to manage to separate the two and cannot focus on either properly. Why is that?