101 Tips for Telecommuters—Successfully Manage Your Work, Team, Technology and Family

8. Get and Keep Your Office Organized

Tom Peters has written eloquently about thriving on chaos, but it's an organizational state of mind—not the way you want to approach telecommuting. It's not even open for debate; it's a given, a truism, an unalterable fact of telecommuting life: lack of organization will doom you.

Managing the tons of paper (weren't we fantasizing about the paperless office just a decade ago?!) is inherent in your ability to be organized (Tip 9), and efficiently processing the mounds of mail you receive (Tip 11) is vital. But you need a context in which to manage the “stuff” of your day, and this context is created by systems and structure.

Unfortunately, you can't run to the local office superstore for your complete, customized ...