Ways to Organize your Home | Document Organization

Last Updated on August 15, 2020 by Ellen Christian

I wrote this post as part of a paid campaign with Brother and Blueprint Social. The opinions in this post are my own. Enter the giveaway to win your own Brother P-Touch.

I love working at home. It’s the best of both worlds. It lets me support my family but still be relatively available for them if they need me. My hours are fairly flexible and I don’t need to worry about commuting in bad weather or having a professional wardrobe. Working at home has a lot of positives but it also has a few negatives.

Ways to Organize your Home | Document Organization

One of the biggest negatives of working at home is finding ways to organize your home office that work for my small home. I don’t have an office with a door that I can close on the paper clutter. My home office is right in the middle of my living room and document organization is one of my biggest challenges.

I decided to use my Brother P-Touch label maker to help me get my document organization under control for the new year. I have contracts, receipts, invoices, check stubs and a lot of other paper clutter to manage. While I need some things to stay out until they’re dealt with, some things can be filed away out of sight once I’ve handled them.

Filing things away isn’t the hard part. The hard part is remembering where I filed them. That’s where labels come in handy. It’s not enough to stick your postage receipts in an envelope if that envelope gets lost underneath that pile of contracts you’re going to file one of these days. Home office organization only works if you’re consistent. For me, being consistent is easier if I see things clearly labeled.  It’s like a mental nudge to put the contract in the contract binder and not pile it on the desk.

I found a file folder organizer to hold my folders of expenses and payments and made sure to label each folder so I put things in the right place. That only left the *to do* pile of papers to be dealt with. You know that pile of papers you’re going to enter on the computer and then file as soon as you finish this post and drop your kid off at their friend’s house? The one that keeps getting bigger and bigger until you HAVE to deal with it?

I needed a way for them to be out in sight to remind me to deal with them but semi-contained and labelled at the same time. A huge pile of unlabelled stuff is chaos. A huge pile of stuff that’s labelled is a bit better. Binder clips work well to keep papers together and I can easily label them with my Brother P-Touch labeller.

I also wanted to find a place to put all of my miscellaneous office supplies. I have binder clips and paper clips and rubber bands and Post-it Flags and way too many other little things that I lose or scatter around the living room.  I decided to glam up some little tins with Washi Tape and then I labelled them so it was easier to remember what was in which tin. It’s really easy to do.

Materials:

• Empty Altoids type tins
• Washi Tape in different colors or designs
• Brother P-Touch Label Maker PT-D200 with tape

Instructions:

• Clean out the Altoids tins and dry thoroughly
• Cover the words and design on the top of the tin with multiple layers of Washi Tape
• Fold the Washi Tape to cover the edges of the tin
• Create labels using the Brother P-Touch Label Maker PT-D200 and apply to the top. Visit Brother to choose the label maker that’s right for you.

I love how many uses the Brother P-Touch has! I can use it to organize my entire home as well as my home office. Since January is National Organizing Month, now is definitely the time to get started. If you’d love to have a Brother-P Touch too, Brother is giving away a P-Touch label maker every day in January as well as a Grand Prize pack worth up to $2000. Enter the giveaway today.