8 Easy Steps To Declutter And Organise Your Home Office

It’s difficult to feel productive when your home office is drowning in clutter, so get everything tidy and organised with our decluttering guide!

Your home office should ideally be the most organised room in your house so that it puts you in a productive mood for working or studying. However, offices can easily accumulate way too much mess and clutter, and getting it all tidied can feel like an intimidating task.

To make it more approachable, take it step by step with our guide to get some quick wins along the way. Whether your desk always seems to be covered in documents and stationery or you’ve ended up with so much furniture that your space now feels claustrophobic, our simple method is here to help.

Our Expert Guide To Tidying And Decluttering Your Study

1. Decide What Your Office Is For

It might sound deceptively simple, but your first step for decluttering your office should be to think about what it’s mainly used for. If it’s just for your work, then you can remove anything that doesn’t help you be productive. That could be spare furniture that’s been left in a corner or piles of books that haven’t made it to the living room bookcase.

However, some home offices serve more than one purpose. Your study might also be your library, in which case you should leave books there to be organised. It could double as a guest room when you have company, so you’ll need to leave in some furniture for that purpose. Whatever you use your home office for, make sure you have that in mind while you’re organising, so you can remove anything that isn’t useful and keep everything that is.

2. Check Where Everything Belongs

Home office clutter can feel uniquely difficult to tidy because it often doesn’t belong to your office at all. It only takes a few piles of laundry dropped off between the bedroom and the washing machine for this to get quickly out of hand, and this can happen with anything: kids’ toys, decor, or even your household’s old tech.

To really start decluttering your home office, you need to grab everything that doesn’t belong and move it to where it should be. This way, when you come back to your home office, you’ll only be faced with actual office clutter, rather than clutter from all over the house. It makes focusing on the task at hand a lot easier too, as you can cut down on trips to different rooms to take stray items home!

3. Clean As You Go

It’s tempting to decide that you’ll dust and clean your office furniture once you’re done with decluttering, but the two should really go hand in hand. Once you’re finished with decluttering, you could lose a lot of your momentum, leading to pushing off cleaning for another day.

By wiping down surfaces as you organise the items that were on them, you’re breaking up the major task of cleaning your whole study into smaller, easier chunks. It’ll all be worthwhile once you can get to work in a tidy, clean home office!

4. Clear Off Your Desk

One of the first places to target in your home office should be your desk, if that’s where you do most of your work. It can easily become a clutter hotspot, which can make it more difficult to keep a clear, focused mind while you’re working.

Something to watch out for is excess stationery, as it can feel useful to keep around, but consider if you really need everything that’s out on your desk. It’s more than likely that some of it can be stored away if you don’t use it very often, especially if you do most of your work on a laptop.

As well as a small amount of essentials for work, choose one or two ornaments or decorations to display, and make sure they’re things that will put you in a cheerful or productive mood. 

5. Organise Your Desk Drawers

If you already have a desk with drawers, then make decluttering them a priority. Take everything out, assess whether you really need each item close to hand, and then return the essentials. Consider using drawer organisers to keep everything tidy, and try grouping together similar items.

However, if your desk doesn’t have drawers, then it might be time to upgrade to one that does, like the Stoke Desk. You could also put a small chest of drawers next to your desk for some extra storage. Just make sure that you stick to the habit of returning items to the drawers they came from, rather than leaving them out on the desk!

6. Make Sure You Have Enough Storage

When you’re struggling to keep the essentials in order and you’ve already cut down on clutter, it might be time to invest in some more storage for your home office. Even if you’re on top of your organisation game, if you don’t have enough space for everything you need then you’ll end up fighting that cluttered look.

If you have the space, try adding a sideboard like the Durum Large Panelled Sideboard for a sophisticated, dark wood look that’s perfect for a home office. It also gives you the option to keep things stored out of sight, which can reduce the visual clutter in your office.

7. Keep Space Clear With A Rug

You might think that decluttering your office is limited to smaller items like papers and stationery, but you should also consider your furniture. It’s easy to go overboard with how much furniture you actually need in a home office, especially if you don’t have much space, and this can give your room a crowded feel.

Sometimes, a different arrangement is all you need. Try using an area rug like the Priya Hand-Tufted Rug to mark out some floorspace that you’ll keep clear, such as in front of an accent chair or your desk. It might seem like a small change, but it can make your whole office feel more spacious and organised.

8. Stay Committed To Regular Decluttering

While decluttering unfortunately isn’t something you’ll only ever have to do once, there are ways to keep it manageable. If you can commit to a few minutes of tidying up every day before you leave your home office, you can make sure it’s always ready for the next time you need it.

You should also assign ‘homes’ to all of your items, so that tidying them up doesn’t come with the stress of trying to figure out where to fit everything. Decide where everything goes during your main decluttering run and you’ll make every subsequent tidy-up ten times easier. To make this a little easier for yourself, you might want to invest in some decorative storage like the Erin Baskets, to keep your home office both organised and stylish.

Take Charge Of Your Office Clutter!

It might feel easier to keep pushing off dealing with your home office’s clutter problem and ignoring it, but the longer you wait, the more there’ll be. The best time to start organising and tidying is right now, and if you put some small but dedicated habits into place, decluttering will get easier and easier every time you do it. If you’re ready to keep going with the rest of your home, check out our guides to spring cleaning your bedroom and living room!