Prepare Your Office for a New Year

I know, I know. It’s not quite 2020 yet. But getting ahead of the game is the name of the game in work settings. But it’s also something that is beneficial for the home. In fact, the new year marks a great time to restock on a lot of your supplies within the office or at home. At this point, you’ve probably put off restocking your materials, or you’ve run out of certain supplies completely without having noticed. In either case, you need more and you’re dreading doing it. But that’s natural.

Think about the last time you ran out of lead on a mechanical pencil or ink in a pen. You probably can’t remember any of the times that you had something on hand to refill it with. But I can guarantee you recall the trip you took to the office supplies or packaging supplies store to get more. Why is that? Because you didn’t like doing it and it interrupted your day, of course.

So whether you’re intending to ship something to a distant family member during the holidays or you want to keep your office space tidy for work at home, you’re sure to benefit from this list of essential supplies.

Cardboard

If you don’t have extra cardboard boxes lying around, you need them immediately. The various uses that cardboard allows are too plenty for you to not be using. And even better, cardboard is pretty much free if you’re willing to ask around for some. Do yourself a solid and get at least 10 different sized cardboard boxes for your own use.

Packaging tape

Packaging tape seals the deal when it comes to remedying a lot of things, even if they’re unrelated to storage or shipping. And even if all you use it for is to wrap birthday gifts or seal up boxes to be put in storage, it’s extremely useful to have around. Having some strong packing tape handy is one of the most important items to have stocked in your office or home.

Black markers

Magic markers are the types of writing utensils that end up in a kitchen drawer buried beneath rubber bands and thumb tacks. But during the holidays, they see a lot more use. These are what everyone uses during the holidays to address a gift to someone else, especially because you can write it directly on a package’s wrapping paper or the box itself.

Overlal, while this list is great for the holidays, you can definitely benefit from having a surplus of office and packaging supplies year-round.

Just Clean the Garage Already!

I’m sure that a lot of men are like me in that they have distinct memories from their childhood of their father and his tools. Perhaps it was a separate garage packed to the brim with all sorts of tools for pretty much anything you could imagine. Or maybe it was watching him change the oil in the family cars, sliding in and out underneath a jacked up vehicle for a few hours on a weekend.

No matter what their memories were, I’m sure they’re similar to mine in the fact that their dad had little to no organization with his tools. (Surely I’m not the only one, right?) Even though I knew that a bit of organization was something that would solve a lot of problems if only he had done a day’s worth of cleaning and rearranging, I’m still the same way my dad was. I don’t have my own garage and all sorts of tools yet, but I can admit that a lot of the stuff in my home is in places that I’d be able to find but no one else would.

The problem is that all this kind of unorganized chaos can become a headache. And when all it takes is proper use of packaging supplies, like a few cardboard boxes, some packing tape to write labels on, and a few hours of your time . . . Well, it’s that easy. That’s about all it takes, yet there are people out there like my dad and me who always find a way to get out of organizing their things.

The funny thing is that it’s not even easier by any means to skip out on organizing things. It actually wastes more time than if you would just tidy up and put things in those cardboard boxes and use your packaging supplies that you know are sitting around other parts of the house.

It actually can cause more stress than just cleaning the garage for one day when you think about it. Like, how much time do you think your dad spends looking around the garage for a single tool? For one particular instance, maybe just a few minutes. But when this happens multiple times a month and accumulates over the course of a year, there would be much more time saved and stress relieved by just getting down to business for an hour or two on a Saturday and cleaning like there’s no tomorrow.