Having a neat area is often a way to impress others and also a good way to help us be motivated to do work. With Singapore being very small in size, our homes and home offices will also be constrained by space. We would need to make use of all available space. As such, here are some hacks that can help you with storing things in your home offices.

Bookshelves

Since it is a home office, we would often have a bookshelf in the room (one or maybe more). These can help us make use of wall spaces to store things or even to decorate. As IKEA has stated, bookshelves are “not just for bookworms”. We can make use of bookshelves with doors to hide away our messes so as to keep our areas neat and tidy.

We can further break down the spaces on shelves through the use of tension rods or bungee cords. These can help us create smaller spaces when used vertically to break down the long horizontal spaces or used horizontally to hang things if the height of the shelves are too high (and for when we do not want to buy more shelves).

In addition, taking note of technological advances, we can make use of these bookshelves as dividers to divide our rooms since we may not have as many books to store when compared to the past. At the same time, we can display certain decorative ornaments on these shelves – precious memories and gifts from friends and family.

Drawer Units

Another way that we can help save space and also to keep our workspaces neat is make use of drawer units. These can be standalone drawer units, attached to the table or even placed on top of other furniture. These can help us organise our knick-knacks and when we need something, we will know where to look for them.

Table Organisers

Table organisers can also be used to help tidy up the table space. This includes pen holders (that can store other things than pens, like cables or small electronic devices), small letter trays to sort our documents and boxes. While we are moving towards the digital age, we cannot deny that we would need some writing materials at times, some physical reminders may be better than digital ones.

Wall Organisers

With the use of written reminders, we can also look at making use of pegboards to help use create wall organisers to free up the floor space for other uses. At the same time, these pegboards can help us to create a small feature on our walls that is unique to each of us, allowing us to express our creativity and individuality.

When looking at organising things on the walls, we can make use of Velcro strips and magnetic strips to help us attach things onto the walls. However, we can also hide these away under the table and inside cabinets. At times, these may look messy when we randomly attach things onto them, but they are rather useful when we need to free up spaces.

We can also make use of baskets and magazine holders to tidy up our place. Attaching them to the walls or putting them on the shelves, these can help us compartmentalise these spaces thereby allowing us to have more “spaces” to pack our things into.

Alternatively, we can also consider making use of shower caddies to help tidy up our spaces especially since these are often hung on walls. As such, these can help us store small items and also free up space – on the floor, on the shelves and also on the table.

Organising Electronics

When moving towards a digital age, we would need to tidy up our electrical wires to avoid clutter. As such, we can consider using baskets as noted earlier or hooks to hang them up. Alternatively, we can also look at making use of clamps and paper clips to hold them in place. IKEA also has cable trunking which can keep your messy wires our of sight. At the same time, we can also make use of hanging shoe organisers to pack the smaller (electronic) items. Another way that we can organise wires can be through the use of curtain rings. We can tread wires those the rings and hang them under the table using a tension rod.

Command Centres

While we have been just looking at the physical space, there is also a need to help organise our work space in terms of working. We can look at having a command centre to help organise our days and have things within our reach.

Assuming that we have our tables against a wall, we can have a command centre directly opposite us. This can help us to organise our to-do lists and have a monthly planner on the wall. On top of that, we can look at making us of those wall spaces to hang some baskets to pack our things. This will help us to be on track while working and also help keep precious table real estate space from clutter.

We can consider making use of pegboards, magnetic boards, cork boards or whiteboards to achieve this (although pegboards may be the most efficient of all). As such, we cannot just hang things off the boards but also have a space to attach our to-do lists and monthly planners.

Repurposing Items around the House

We can also consider repurposing items used around the house. This can help use cut down on costs of purchasing items for organising our things in our offices.

Looking at table organisers, we can make use of old cups and mason jars to hold our stationery and small knick-knacks such as paper clips and USB sticks. In addition, these can also help us organise our small electronic devices such as additional adapters for our computers.

In addition, when looking at organising our cables, we can look at repurposing old shoeboxes that we always throw away. These can be easily manipulated into boxes with small compartments and access holes for wires to slide out of.

While this may not be a comprehensive list, the above mentioned ideas can help with tidying up our workspaces to make it neater and allowing us to have a more productive working environment at home.