Weekend Candy: 5 Tips To Organzie Your Workspace

from Better Homes and Gardens

One of my favorite things to do on a weekend is to clean up. Honestly! I love to keep my life somewhat organized and clean. During the week I´m mostly too exhausted to make big cleanups, so by the weekend the apartment is not as spick and span as I would like it to be. (Monday is good, Tuesday as well, Wednesday is like lifting your head from the pillow after a quick after-work-snooze and thinking "I´ll do it tomorrow.", Thursday is starting to get messy and Friday is just dreadful.)
This week has been so busy and stressful that I hardly got to touch anything on my desk at work. Whatever got there, stayed there. (sorry, everyone for that mess, haha!) But in fact I love to organize things. I sort them either by color (like my books) or by shape. Keeping your workspace clean will keep your motivation up, so you can sit down and start instead of spending 20 minutes to even be able to work. In order to help you, I collected some really nice links to get you going.

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home of Jane Cumberbatch on designsponge

♥ Get a pin board. The bigger the better. Try to get one that matches the colors of your walls, otherwise it might look like a massive monster, glaring down at you. I like to use white or pastel colored pins that won´t distract from the content too much. Sadly most magnetic pin boards are too small for my taste, so I have to push myself a lot in order to punch pins through the paper. (I always feel like I can´t undo that hole anymore and it makes me very uncomfortable.) Try to organize all your inspirations and papers by color. It won´t look as messy as if you put them on randomly.


♥ Follow a certain routine. What I´ve learned from the way I clean up is that I try to do multiple things at one time. That might be good, but it also brings one fact into the game that is very crucial. The rule is to never pick up a thing a second time. Meaning: I you pic up a pencil from your desk to store it away, make sure you are not doing 5 things at the same time, or you will end up leaving the pencil somewhere else because you just quickly wanted to get the clothes from the dryer. You then have to go search for it and you lose time. Every item that you pick up has to be stored correctly right away. One step after another. That brings me to my next point:

by Becoming Bianca

♥ Use labels. Sounds simple, yet it´s very effective. It prevents being sloppy and putting things somewhere just because you´re in a hurry. For me labeling also means making things look nice and cute. I always buy cute asian diary stickers on ebay an put them onto jars, folders and everything else that I use for work. I need to "own" my things, making it much more likely that I use them.

by Emma Bee

♥ Get things off the table. One of the hardest things to to is to keep your desk free from too much clutter. Put whatever needs to stay on the desk in a cute desk organizer. Everything else needs to go. Either boxes or folders or jars. The ones of you who might be interested in Feng Shui will find this link as very helpful. Starting off your work with a clean and empty desk can change your workflow a lot. I hate it when I need to clean up everything before I can start. I know that I am picky when it comes down to that, but even if you´re not, you might profit from an organizes workspace too.

♥ Order your drawers in layers of importance. You know the situation: You look for something in your drawers and it´s not there. Or you have to get down to the bottom drawer what feels like a zillion times a day. Funny enough it took my quite a long time to re-organize my drawers in a more effective way. I put the things that I use the most in the top drawer and anything else according to importance below. Keep the things that you need often in reach. Don´t make work unnecessarily harder than it needs to be.


Links for pros:

♥ Home Office Organizing Tips & DIY Projects
♥ Deliciously Organized
♥ Mason Jar Craft Storage
♥ DIY Wood Magazine File (sooo pretty!)
♥ The Home Office Organizer
♥ 7 Habits Of Highly Organized People

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5 things I am grateful for today:

• sleeping like I haven´t slept in weeks. I had the weirdest dreams, but at least I had enough rest.
• re-working the blogdesign twice since yesterday and I think I get closer to the feeling that I want. I´m glad I can do this all by myself.
• learning more html tricks from Mr.DomDom
• cooking for the whole family. It´s more fun when more people get to appreciate the food.
• finding hilarious old pictures of my on my external hard drive. (I think I need to share some soon, right?) Looking back, it´s not all too bad, but I never want to be 16 again. Or 19. Or 22. In fact, I love being 25 and getting to be 26 soon. One should always make the best of each year. Its just a number for the record, that´s all.

Happy weekend!
XOXO,