Bring order to your home office with Adobe Acrobat online

After months and months at home, you’ve likely spent considerable time contemplating or making updates to your space — and you’re not alone.

Whether it’s the Chinese art of feng shui, the Danish practice of hygge, or another popular method that appeals to you, different home organization styles have one thing in common: they’re all clutter-free. You can bring that mentality to your digital life as well — especially after a year in which Americans experienced an increase in work-related screen time.

While decluttering your home workspace, inbox, and desktop may seem overwhelming, it’s something you can tackle five minutes at a time with the help of Adobe Scan and Acrobat online PDF tools on your journey toward home office space serenity.

Split your tangle of organizational jobs into smaller tasks

You can’t summit Everest in a few hours, so don’t plan to organize everything in a single afternoon. Build out a checklist and start working your way through one item at a time:

• Where do you need to organize things?
  • Desk
  • Piles of mail and other paper clutter
  • Computer desktop
  • Computer files
  • Phone
• What organizational jobs are part of that?
  • Organize what needs to be saved
  • Delete or trash what doesn’t

From bookcases to desk drawers, organize small items like paper clips and other office supplies piecemeal to make headway. Each area you give a home organization makeover will build momentum and you’ll begin feeling like a professional organizer in no time.

Digitally file important papers

When you start in on your stacks of documents, don’t spend time sorting every single piece of paper — all your bank statements, medical records, and tax returns — into a file cabinet. Go paperless with Adobe Scan and clear off your office desk space. This free mobile app turns your phone’s camera into a scanning device so you can quickly digitize all your important paperwork.

Adobe Scan saves your scanned documents as PDFs in an easily accessible online account instead of burying them in a filing cabinet. Once you scan them, you can send your paper copies to the shredder and then recycle them — tidying up your space while improving security.

Take this paper organization method one day at a time to convert birth certificates, marriage certificates, insurance policies, and social security cards into easy-to-search digital backups you can access via the Acrobat online storage space from any browser, any time.

Organize your digital documents

Home office organization ideas don’t just apply to your physical space. An organized computer will help you stay on track and be productive, especially when you work from home. Downloads, spreadsheets, and more may litter your desktop and folders. Follow these digital organizing tips and storage ideas to stop getting distracted by file clutter:

• Start with structure: Organize your files based on how you search — by topic, project, or file type.
• Narrow it down with subcategories: Create smaller groupings of folders to track down files quickly.
• Name your documents: Establish a consistent naming system for your files to help you easily find the right version of the right document.

Take your digital filing system further by trying easy-to-use Acrobat online tools:

• Consolidate your files: Combine your files by merging smaller PDFs into comprehensive documents like monthly, or even yearly, reports.
• Reorder your PDFs: Organize and rearrange pages in your scanned PDF documents to ensure your content is in the right order.
• Align files for easy viewing: Don’t crane your neck looking at sideways scans. Rotate PDF pages so everything’s properly aligned.
• Add precision to your PDFs: Make files easier to find by splitting large PDFs into smaller documents, so you can search and find them more easily.
• Discard the excess mess: Clean up your PDFs by easily deleting duplicate, outdated, or unwanted pages.

Go a step further with smartphone tidying

From photos and texts to emails and apps, one look at a chaotic phone can wash away any contentment you’re feeling about having an organized home office and computer desktop. Thankfully, you can tidy up your mobile device on the go or at home.

• Purge the extra: Free up real estate on your phone by deleting ancient text conversations, unused apps, and blurry photos. Keep any digital relics that bring you joy, but the rest can — and should — go. Take the same approach to your email. Dive in and unsubscribe from any service clogging your inbox. Check your open browser tabs too and close any that are bogging you down.
• Declutter your phone: Put photos into albums so you can find them more easily. Group related apps together to clean up your home screen and make things simpler to find. Move any downloaded files, like PDFs or eBooks, to a cloud storage solution like Acrobat online.

A little at a time, you can bring tranquility to large or small spaces with these DIY home office organization methods and help from Acrobat. Your organizational efforts will help bring peace of mind to your work and guide you to a more stress-free future.