A couple months ago I shared with you how I got my small home office ready. Today I want to show you how I organize it.

I have two shelves, a desk and a magazine holder to keep all my papers and supplies.

On my the shelves I keep:

– Books: I recently purged my books and I just keep the ones I love and refer to them often. Chances that I will read a book a second time are almost zero.

– Pens and art supplies: I keep them categorized in some mason jars that I already had. I think it looks nice there as well.

– Magazine Folders: In them you will find some of my Storage Magazines (I consult them often to look for inspiration for the perfect system for my clients) and my kids keepsake baby books.

– Binders: I like to use binders to organize some of my business paper work, home schooling activities for the kids, and kids documents.

– Planner: I use an arc system from Staples as my home planner. I like to design my own monthly planner, project tracker, meal planer, expenses tracker, etc.

– Recipes and cookbook: I have two binders where I keep my collage of recipes. One is for my Brazilian recipes and the other one for my recipes in English. I also keep some cookbooks in easy access. However, soon I will have finished transferring most of them to my cook’n app.

– Office Supplies: I have a wooden tea box I painted and decoupaged when I was a teenager that wasn’t been used and now is the home for my office supplies. I love looking at it!

– Decoration: My few decor items are some of my favorites from growing up. It makes me happy to look at them. It is important to put things that we love in use, otherwise what is the point of having them? 

Oh! This is getting long =) Let’s move to my desk.

I like to have a clean space to work, plus my desk is not that big anyways, so I have my computer, and couple decorate items on it.

In the first drawer (the largest one) I like to keep all the papers I am working on, other planners, notebooks, etc. I like this system because it keeps my desktop clean most of the time.
The smallest drawer is the home for some notepads, pens that I use everyday, the charger for my camera, some candies, etc.

In the shelves, behind the door, I keep my extra recipe books, a container with a project that I am working on: right now I have some papers that I need to purge and file.

Large drawer

Small drawer

Shelves in the desk

I also have a wall mounted magazine organized where I keep my active files. I will talk more about active files in details in my next post.

So that is it! This is how I organize my small efficient home office. Here I have most of the important zones an office needs to have: work, filing, planning, office supplies, books, and school zones. We do mail and bill payment in the dining room so these zones are located on our command center area, since there is where we keep all the incoming mail as well.

Here are some more pictures for you to get inspired: