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Take These 4 Steps to Organize Your Kitchen Office

The modern, American kitchen has truly become a multipurpose room.  In addition to cooking and socializing, many people use the kitchen as an office and workspace. The kitchen office may be a place where people do a large amount of work or a space were only small tasks take place.  The kitchen table may be a heavily-used workspace for personal, business or school-related activities.  It’s often the case that the kitchen office functions as a transition zone as paper, things and information enter and leave the house.

Typical Forms of Kitchen Offices

  • The kitchen has a built in office/workspace that includes a desk, drawers and cabinets or shelves.
  • Part of a kitchen countertop is used for office functions.
  • Part-time use of the kitchen table for work-, home- or school-related tasks.

Whatever your kitchen office set up is, the basic needs are similar:

  • A clear work surface
  • Clearly defined collection points for paper and things
  • Storage for supplies
  • Storage for papers and/or files (typically active or reference)

4 Steps to Organize your Kitchen Office:

  1. Take a look at what you’re currently doing.  How are you currently using the kitchen office?  What types of things are you doing there?  What’s working?  What’s not working? (Takes up too much space? Visually cluttered? Things getting lost?)
  2. Get clarity on what you need the space for (transition zone, information zone, workspace) and organize to meet the need.
  3. Make sure the things you need have clearly defined homes and put the things you don’t need away somewhere else.
  4. Establish new habits.  The space is set up to support your needs, establish some new behaviors to effectively use the space.  Put things where they belong, routinely clear the space of items that don’t belong. Educate others on what the space is for and how they can us it.  New behaviors take time to establish.  Don’t be discouraged if you get off track.  Don’t give up!  Reflect on what happened and, if needed, make adjustments to tweak the behaviors you need to make your kitchen office space a productive one. 

A common frustration people have with their kitchen office space is that clutter builds up and spreads to other parts of the kitchen.  This results in not being able to find things as well as not being able to effectively use the space for getting work done.  The key to preventing clutter build up is to regularly making decisions about the things that are there. Do you need it? Yes, then put it away.  Do you need to do something with it? Yes, take action or schedule a time to take action.  A few minutes each day or up to 15 minutes once a week is all the time it typically takes to keep an organized space decluttered.

Do you need help decluttering or setting up a kitchen office that supports your needs?  Contact us to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation and we’ll get you started with some ideas and strategies.

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