I received an email about my home office, as pictured on Home Office Warrior, about how I keep it so neat and especially what do I do with all of the wires.
First, as to cutter, it is a life long battle for me. With age it comes with the increased desire to feel comfortable in my office. Attorneys and others want to avoid their offices because they just do not feel comfortable there. The drive toward the paperless office has helped tremendously, but it takes effort. When paper comes in (and it does) it has to be scanned immediately and the paper by product placed in the recycle bin. The recycle bin is taken to recycle center on Saturday mornings. But, it also starts by not hanging everything you have on the wall, and trying to keep the surfaces clean. You have to make a deliberative effort to stop hoarding.
Second, wire control is the biggest part of clutter in a home office. It is silent. It sneaks up on you. It creeps about in corners, and around desks and on the walls. Wiring is very depressing to be around. Do you like to drive down a busy road with nothing on both sides by signage and high power and telephone lines? To me that is how most offices feel. It can aggravate your every nerve.
You have really got to lunch an all-out battle in the war against wires. Contrary to popular belief, in your home office or nook you cannot go wireless. You have too many little peripheral with which you must deal. Ipod connectors, printer connections, wires to the scanner, a second monitor, speakers, and the dreaded Internet connection (because wireless Internet is okay but not when you need to so some serious work).
You have got to enter into a conscious, deliberative, determined effort to get the wires our of sight, because they will ruin your wellbeing and your desire to work in your office.
The first thing is to get all wires that you can behind the walls. I converted a little nook in my hallway into a small closet just to hold my modem and router, and all of the wires this entails. Then I ran the wires through the walls to every room. You might be able to use an existing closet. I used the upper part of a closet in my old home. The cost for running wires in this way ranges from about $40 to $80 an outlet. Just in case, I put three outlets in my home office at a cost of $180.00.
The second thing that helps a lot in my office is I have a dock for my notebook computer, from which I work. This allows me to keep all of the wires permanently connected to the dock and not just laying out on or under the desk when I take my computer with me.
This leads to the third thing. You need to coordinate your wires, get them off of the ground, and run them up under your desk (out of sight). Some people like to use ties of various kinds for this to bind and bundle the wires together. I do not. The reason is two-fold. One, this does not get the wires off the ground or necessarily out of sight. Two, should you need to work with the wires later you have to unbind them and unbundled them.
I use two avenues. One is to buy tables an desks that have tracks for your wiring. Other than this I like to use industrial strength Velcro tape. It allows me to put one side of the tape at various points on the underside of my desk, then run the wires where they need to go, and then place the other side of the Velcro tape to hold the wires in place. If I put a little time into keeping the wires from getting tangled during the installation, then if I need to add or replace a wire all I have to do is pull those parts of the Velcro tape apart to do so and then stick it back together.
As Pogo says, "We have seen the enemy, and he is us!" All of us need to take better aim at our office clutter and wiring problem by going to the root of the problem, which is our own thinking. Then we can start to employ the simple and cost effective techniques to turn and keep our offices an enjoyable place to work.
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