Five Tips for Organizing Your Workspace for Fall

One of our favorite things about the shift to working from home has been elevating our workspace with scent. When you’re in an office, this is a bit trickier. Most offices don’t allow candles, and even getting a diffuser can be controversial—what if your colleague doesn’t like the scent? At home, you have free reign to scent your workday as you please. Studies have shown that associating a scent with a specific action can help you perform that action better (for example: students who smelled peppermint while studying for their final exams and then chewed peppermint gum during the examination session, showed increased performance). So, each fall, in order to up our focus game, we’ll purchase a scent and we’ll only light it when we’re working. That way, we’re priming our brains to get ready for work as soon as they smell. Our pick in this case is the gorgeous Carola fra i Trulli almond tree ceramic trullo. It smells delicious enough to get us excited about work, no matter what we’re sitting down to do.

If you don’t have a desk planner and calendar yet, consider these your signs to purchase. While we all have Google and Outlook keeping track of our day-to-day lives, writing down our commitments (big meetings, calls, dinners, events, and any travel) on a monthly or weekly calendar allows for clearer visualization—and can help you avoid overcommitting—which often happens when we get into that ambitious, back-to-school mode. Bigger calendar = clearer view = less overwhelm. We’ll take it!

Once you’re primed for productivity, both thanks to your workspace scent and your clearly organized calendar, it’s time to organize the desk itself. Purchasing a set of pens and a gorgeous pen cup will help prepare you to write down any brilliant sudden thoughts or transcribe meeting notes with ease (you can also use a repurposed candle vessel, like the aforementioned Carola trullo). And speaking of those sudden thoughts: let’s not forget about the power of sticky notes—the original iPhone notes app. We use them all the time to write quick things down that might not necessarily warrant a spot on the calendar or in our planners—but we know they’re not the most aesthetically driven purchase, so we like to store them in a leather holder. Same goes for legal pads: while you can (and probably do) take notes on your computer, studies do show that writing notes physically can help you better commit your thoughts to memory. So we’ll take a coordinating leather legal pad holder, too.

We know: there’s lots beyond sticky notes, legal pads, and pens that you can’t—or don’t want to—display on your desk, especially with a desk calendar taking up some significant extra space. That’s where inner drawer desk organizers come in. Poppin is our go-to brand for great ones: you can store everything from a nail file to a lip balm to a face mist (three great things to have in your arsenal prior to any Zoom meeting) to more academically driven things like work ID cards, notebooks, and beyond within.

It’s easy to reach for your phone for a quick distraction when you’re dealing with a challenge at work. But we saw a huge change in the way we worked when we started strategically stacking a few business and personal development books (currently: Obsessed by Emily Heyward, Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal, and Start With Why by Simon Sinek) at our desk. Instead of reaching for a cell phone when we need a break, we’ll grab one of the books and set a 5-minute timer to read from it. It’s a great way to re-energize without losing yourself in the social media scroll.