Tired of finding colored pictures among your invoices? Have you ever discovered random lego pieces among your inventory? If so, you must own a home business, and you must be working from anywhere in the house but your very own office. So you need a home office. How does a home business owner move successfully from the living room to the office?
First, the home business owner needs to establish his or her own space for an office. Find a spare room or a room you can easily concert into an office. Even a corner of the garage will do for a first-time home business owner. Remember to start small and invest little at the beginning, and then when you can afford it, you can build or create the office of your dreams. If you do not have your own space, however, you will be doomed forever to finding peanut butter smeared on important documents, and you will sacrifice the professional look that you need to exude to have a successful home business.
Secondly, once you have your space chosen and established, organize your goods. Invest in some organizational materials like shelves (cheap from the hardware store), categorizing materials like labels and sharpies, colored boxes, and a filing cabinet. Once you know what you need for organizational materials and invest in them, organize your office with two frames of mind: organize it so that it makes sense to you, and organize so that if something should happen to you and those you love most would need to find important documents quickly, they would be able to. So your system should not just make sense to you, but it should make sense to just about anyone. It should be simple enough that your fifth grader can understand it.
