If you work from home, then you’re probably familiar with the struggle it is to constantly stay productive and get work done when surrounded by distractions. When your work environment is the same as your home environment, either all the time or some of the time, it’s all too easy to make excuses to go to the kitchen or pick up that tempting book on the coffee table, and these things can be destructive. our productivity. .

Another problem is that home offices are designed and maintained by U.S. There is no boss to tell us to keep our desk tidy, no human resources team to advise us on the best posture or the best point in the room to improve productivity. Here are some fixes that can help you stay on task.

paper trays

Having paperwork everywhere is a problem that affects not only home-based workers, but almost everyone else as well. The first solution to this problem is to get paper trays that allow you to quickly and easily “discard” your papers so that at least they don’t get dirty.

Here you will have two trays. One will be your ‘working memory’ and the other will be your ‘short term memory’. Anything you’re done with but not ready to get rid of will go into your ‘short-term memory’, while anything you’re still working on or can throw away later will go into your ‘short-term memory’ ‘. work memory’. At a predefined time each day/week/month, it will sort through the trays and move anything from the short-term memory tray to a filing cabinet: your “long-term memory”. This mimics the way the human brain stores information and makes it much easier to stay on top of everything.

handheld scanners

Portable scanners are scanners that can take paper through a feeder similar to a printer. Some of these can even take multiple sheets of paper at once and this makes it much easier to quickly scan reams of documents while OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software will automatically catalog and organize them. This allows you to get rid of a incredible much paper and thus create much less paper for you. Likewise, of course, you should go paperless with your bills, statements, and everything else you can.

desk toys

If you have problems with procrastination, then a desk toy can really help. This can include things like small rakes and litter pits, or cat cots. The reason these work well is that they provide work for idle thumbs, but aren’t nearly as attractive as a mobile phone. In other words, you can play with these little toys while your computer charges and not risk getting ‘sucked in’. They also add to that business feel and make your home office feel more like a real workplace.