Lorie’s Favorite Office Products of All Time, Part 2 | Clutter Video Tip

If going into your home office
Makes the dread in you arise,
It may be the perfect time
To buy some new supplies.

So watch this helpful video
Chock full of favorite buys,
And then your home office
You will happily organize!

(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdofffav2.)

Transcript:

Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to have Part 2 of our series on must have organizing products for your home office. I had so many things I wanted to talk about that I had to split it into two parts. Part 1 is more about paper management, and this part is about kind of everything else in your home office.

So, I’d like to start with my Arc Planner. This is a customizable planner – you can get these at Staples – they have a whole line of modular pieces that you can put together your own custom notebook. As you can see, there are dividers here and all kinds of different styles of paper that you can put in it; little Post-It notes and stuff. What’s great though, is that you can reconfigure this notebook on the fly. So, you can remove the pages, then you can stick them back in another place, and put them back and just rearrange your notebook anytime you want. So, you’re not stuck with whatever the spiral notebook bound you to. You can change it and make it work for you any given day. So I love that.

The next thing is answering a question people ask me all the time about managing your passwords. I really like managing my passwords with an electronic password keeper. I have a whole other video about this. But if you want to manage it with a paper based product, you can use this Internet password organizer. This was designed by a friend of mine. It looks like an address book. It’s very nondescript on your shelf so it hides away in plain sight. You can put all of your passwords in there. You’ve got one place to hold everything all together and it’s just a great idea. If you want to manage your passwords with written format instead of electronic, this is a great solution.

The next thing I want to talk about is helper shelves. I talk about these all the time in the kitchen and in the closet and in other places in the house, but as you can see here, your office needs helper shelves too. I have one here that I use for my printer so that I can elevate my printer from a flat surface and I can store more things underneath it. I have my stapler here, I’ve got scratch paper and refill paper, so I’m sure you can see how that is very helpful.

Another thing we use a lot in other areas of the house that also is used in a home office is drawer dividers. These are a classic organizing product, but you can get these in various configurations, different brands, mostly they have a way to interlock with each other and hook on, and then you can configure them in any custom way you need to for the drawer that you have. The problem that you’re going to have most likely when you use drawer dividers is that when you open and close the drawer they may slide around and slide to the back of the drawer.

So the next thing that’s a favorite product of mine is solving that problem. It’s museum putty. So this is available on-line. You can just search for that and buy that I’m sure on Amazon or something. Museum putty has a way of securing things to whatever surface you like. This was originally designed for earthquake prone areas where items might fall off the shelf during a tremor. It’s just putty. You know, you just take a little dab of it and you stick it underneath these drawer dividers and secure it down, and that way when you open and close the drawer, it doesn’t move. So, you’ve solved that problem.

Another thing we use everywhere else in the house too is great in the home office. Adhesive hooks and other kinds of removable adhesive products. They have things for cord management, all kinds of shapes and sizes of hooks. I use one just like this underneath the lip of my desk where I hook my headset for my phone. I use a corded headset, and I just hang it there. That way I always know where it is, and it’s out of the way. So I’m sure you can think of many uses for this in your home office.

Another common product that we use in other areas is Velcro. And we use this for managing cords and cables in an office environment. So here’s the neat little trick that I learned from another organizer friend of mine. If you buy Velcro for managing cords and cables, they do sell that as a specialty product. You can find that on-line and in office supply stores and it’s way more expensive than this other option, which is go to your gardening center. They sell these big rolls of green thin Velcro that are all, you know, just one big roll of this Velcro tape stuff. And you can just pull off as much as you want and clip it to the size that you need and yes, it’s green for gardening, but it doesn’t matter. So, then you just use that to wrap the cords and cables, and it’s much less expensive than buying those specialty Velcro products. So check that out.

So my next favorite product is the Elfa Rolling Cart. I have installed so many of these in so many homes in my practice. They are particularly good for home offices that need a little versatility. So, for example, if someone has a kitchen table style business. They need to pull this cart up to the kitchen table, do what they need to do, and go and park this cart somewhere else while they use the kitchen table for other things later. You’ve got your files in the top, you’ve got two big drawers to store office supplies that you need most handy for what you’re doing, and it’s a perfect solution for that versatility.

Last but not least, the lowly label maker, the unsung hero of all the organizing projects I’ve ever done. I want to show you Old Bessie here, who has been with me my entire career. This thing is over 15 years old; it is still ticking. All I have to do is replace the batteries and the tape and it just still goes on strong. That just goes to show you that all you need to spend is $20 to $40 for a household level label maker to do whatever you need to do. They sell bigger ones that come in a typewriter case, and they look very elaborate. You don’t need that, you just need something simple like this, and you’ll be all set.

If you need some advice on organizing products for your home office, I have a couple of resources for you. One is I have a whole book about home offices. The Home Office Handbook. You can get that on Amazon or at my web site. And if you need help with your home office and you need personal advice, you can get help from our team for about the price of a pizza. We are very affordable; we’re at clutterdiet.com/learnmore. You can read more about it there. You can also go in and see our Light Memberships, which give you a peek behind the scenes with no credit card required, no strings attached. You can kind of come back there and see what we’re all about and watch some of our tutorials and make a decision of what you want to do to get help from our team.

So thank you for watching, we’ll see you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.

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