Five Simple Ways to Organise Your Home Classroom

No 9am lectures? No travelling for miles to campus? No need to shower? Studying from home might sound great on the surface, but have you got what it takes to stay organised in your home classroom?

Studying from home? It’s not as easy as you thought it would be, right? While you may be armed with all the right materials, all the right tools, and an almost never ending supply of snacks, it’s hard to replicate the feel of the classroom in your own dining room. One of the big problems here is that homes are organised for living, not for learning… but there are a few little tricks that can help you stay coordinated.

1. Make Space

First thing’s first. You can’t expect to keep all your stuff organised if you’ve got no space to put it. It’s not like you have a full-size lecture hall leading off your kitchen. And while you might be tempted to just take up residence on your sofa with your laptop on your knee, you’re probably going to find that you’re more motivated if you’ve got a dedicated workspace. If you don’t have one, make one. To free up some space, you could put a few items away in storage boxes for the time being, or even use secure self storage units to get non-essentials out of the way. Giving yourself the space you need to learn, and the space you need to keep all your materials, is a great foundation for staying organised in your home classroom.

2. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Staying organised in your home classroom means ensuring that everything - everything - has a space. This reduces the risk of papers being left lying around and ending up inside the dog. Or even worse: pens. But don’t worry. Staying organised while learning from home doesn’t have to mean spending out on folders and filing solutions. Not if you set yourself a recycling challenge. Why not have a quick look around your home and see if there’s anything that you could re-purpose for extra classroom storage? Pretty much anything can double as storage if you get creative enough. Think laundry baskets for books, old plant pots for pens, and even empty mason jars for your massive stash of sherbies and fantales.

3. Spread Upwards, Not Outwards

Even the most organised student will run out of space eventually. And this is where things start to go pear shaped. You’ve got no room left to make another pile of paperwork, so you combine piles.. And you combine more… and by the time you need to review something you’ve no idea where it’s gone. So to stay organised, instead of storing outwards, start storing upwards. If you don’t want to bring in book shelves or shelving units, over-the-door hanging shoe organisers can be ideal. And a wall-mounted blackboard, whiteboard, or calendar can help to reduce the amount of paper on your workstation. By storing upwards, you can make the most of dead space and really maximise your classroom storage.

4. Something in, Something out 

OK, so imagine you’ve followed tips 1 - 3 and you’ve created yourself a pretty decently organised home classroom. Good for you. There’s a definite sense of satisfaction here, like balancing all your fruit perfectly in your fruit bowl. But then what happens when you go and add another orange? It all comes tumbling down. And that’s what can happen when you start adding more work papers and materials into your well-organised classroom. So to try and stay organised at home, implement a ‘something in, something out’ system. It means that for every new item that you bring into your classroom, something else has to go. It could be a broken pencil, completed revision books, or your empty Freddo wrappers.

5. Create a ‘To Do’ List 

Keeping your classroom organised throughout the day? Yeah, it’s easy. Keeping your classroom organised at the end of the day? Not so much. After a full day of studying, when you’re tired and just want to plop down on the sofa with a Carlton Draught, there’s nothing easier than saying ‘I’ll put that away in the morning’... and that’s a slippery slope if ever there was one! To keep your home classroom organised, you’ll need to create a ‘to do’ list which you tick off at the end of each day. You can make the list as comprehensive or as simple as you like, but it should at the very least include tidying papers, putting pens back in their pots, taking out plates, dishes, and cups, and getting set up for the morning’s tasks.

Finding the Motivation 

These simple ways to organise your home classroom may look good on paper… but in reality it’s not always easy. You’ve become accustomed to real classrooms, and real teachers, and having to take on the responsibility not only for your own learning but for your own organisation can be a massive change. So here’s a piece of advice that may help: stop, take a step back, and do something else for a little while.

The truth is that nobody is in the right frame of mind to organise their home classroom all of the time. Sometimes, you need a change of scenery, and a bit of fun, before coming back to your classroom ready to get things in their right places and tidy up papers. Maybe watch a quick episode of your favourite Netflix show, try out some tasty recipes, or play a game. Organisation is easier when you’re in the game.

About our guest blogger

Kirsty Morbidelliis is the U-Store-It Facility Development Manager whose years of experience in the moving and storage industry allow her to develop and design customised solutions to suit residential, business and corporate customers’ self-storage needs.