Carefully plan and design your home office workspace to ensure maximum personal productivity. If at all possible, resist the temptation to turn a corner of the living room or your bedroom into your office. Ideally, you’ll want a separate room with a door that closes to keep business activities in and family members out. If this is not possible, you’ll have to find a means of converting a room with a partition or simply find hours to do the bulk of your work when nobody else is home.

Your work area should include a dedicated telephone line, a nice size workstation, your computer, printer and other types of technology that you may need. You will also need a place, to keep your files, paperwork, books and magazines.

Since you will want to enjoy your time working, you can place some reminders about your office area, such as a family photograph, you can simply place it on one of your shelves. These items can help you to remember the best things about working from your home. You can keep other areas of your life nearby in order to stay focused on the reasons why you are working so hard. You want to remember that you are doing this for a better lifestyle for your family and yourself.

Eliminating clutter is ideal of course, however if you need to keep items out and available for your use you should do so. When you are efficient, there is no strict system that you must work with. Your goal is business success. If this means that, you work from a rebuilt walk in closet that is great. You want to set up your workspace in a manner that offers you the most efficiency.

Ensure that your office and workspace are ergonomically designed for maximum productivity. Ergonomic experts agree that a good design can increase productivity by as much as 20 percent. Invest in books that explain ergonomics, such as chair size, sitting position, lighting, body position and placement of monitor and keyboard. Proper ergonomic office design and layout will create a productive work environment.

The key to staying organized is not about which type of filing system you have, but about managing your business, about having systems in place to do things. Therefore, you want to establish a routine by which you can accomplish as much as possible in a given workday. Small things such as creating a to-do list at the end of each business day will keep you efficient. Creating a single calendar to work from will also ensure that you complete jobs on schedule. Incorporating family and personal activities into your work calendar is also critical.

Carefully planning out-of-office client meetings in blocks, such as an entire morning, afternoon or day, may reduce the travel time if the clients are in one area. However, taking a large block of time to drive all over the place may leave you unavailable to other customers for too long. Therefore, you might schedule two short trips out of the office to two specific areas in which to meet clients.

Remember to include both your high and low priority items on your to-do list. Remember you need to take the time to return telephone calls or business emails. You will need to know the schedules of those you interact with on a regular basis such as vendors and others. You should make a note when you have vendors that are available only during the early hours. You will also need to incorporate your schedule with others when it is necessary and you will need to allow for the differences of various time zones.