Blueprint Magazine: Making Your Workspace More User-Friendly!

The September/October of Blueprint has some great suggestions for personalizing your workspace. Many of us spend so much time at the office or in a home office, why not make it an extension of our personalities?

Here are some of their ideas:

* Inject your workspace with a favorite color, using just a few subtle instances of it, so it doesn’t become overwhelming. File folder labels, for instance, or paper cups out of which to drink water.

* Add small personal touches. Find meaningful items that speak to you, and display them. They may be something as simple as a shell or rock that reminds you of a special day at the beach, or in the mountains. Or perhaps a small toy that was one of your child’s favorites that they’ve now outgrown.

* Find your best way to work, then tailor your workstation to it. Do you work best with no distractions? Clear everything superfluous from your desktop. Do you prefer to have everything in view? Try see-through folders and envelopes to store things. Are you very visually oriented? Perhaps organizing things by color would help you find things more easily.

As Blueprint home editor Page Marchese Norman says, “Just because we need office supplies doesn’t mean the office-supply store is the only place to buy them.” Look around your home and see what you have that could live a secret life in your office or cubicle.

Included in the article is a link to a free fun calendar to print out. It can be printed as a dodecahedron, or as a rhombic dodecahedron. Find it at http://www.ii.uib.no/~arntzen/kalender/.

For photos of additional Blueprint work spaces, go to blueprintmag.com.