Family tech: Organize your home workspace

Year's end is a great time to unwind from Christmas and spend time with family and friends. It is also a good time to think about getting your ducks in a better row for the upcoming year. While many of us operate on fiscal calendars at work, personally we operate on a calendar year. These few days we have before 2010 begins are a good chance to review some of how we use technology to organize our lives, and how we might organize ourselves better.

One area we can improve is in our personal work areas. When many of us first brought computers into our home, they were for gaming or other non-essential uses. Now they have moved to the forefront in terms of helping us with our personal finances, shopping, communications, socializing, and working from home. When the computer was not as critical to us as it is now, we may not have given it a prime location in our work areas.

As more and more people telecommute, and more businesses are run from the home, people have started looking at their home work areas to make them ergonomic, relaxing, and efficient to work from.

Lifehacker.com frequently features clever home offices people have created. This week's link page has photos and descriptions of some showing not only radically remodeled parts of homes into elaborate office spaces, but simpler affairs where people have "hacked" Ikea products to make small, efficient work spaces. Some of the best are amazing arrangements done by dormitory residents.

Is your personal paperwork workflow as good as it should be? I am a big believer in scanning documents as they come into the house. NeatReceipts is a nice little sheet fed scanner that is matched with software making it easy to find tax receipts, bills and other documents. It can even help prepare business expense reports. Personally I use mine with Evernote. Evernote lets you store and search all sorts of notes: scanned documents, web pages, web links, notes, voice notes and much more.

After scanning, all documents are either filed away or shredded. With identity theft on the rise, all homes should have and use a shredder.

Evernote can be helpful too with de-cluttering your home. Buy plastic or cardboard boxes and box up little-used items. Take a digital photo of the contents before you seal the box, and of box label. On the label, list a number, the list of contents, the date packed and a place to write the date each time you access the box.

Move the photos of each box content and label into Evernote. Since Evernote allows you to search on the words in a photo, later you can search on "baby clothes" and find the box that contains them. When you go into that box, write the date you accessed it. If you find a box that hasn't been ac-cessed in quite a long while, then that box becomes a candidate for your next yard sale. And for that next yard sale, services like yardsalesearch.com and yardsaletreasuremap.com help you promote your sale and get more buyers.

Many computers now support having more then one monitor attached. Studies have shown two monitors increase productivity. Now that we tend to multi-task, perhaps chatting on one screen while working or watching a video on the other, two monitors make sense for more and more of us. While it looks best to have two identical monitors, even an old one kicking around the house can be pressed into service.

With all the Christmas cards lying about, it is a good time to update your contact list. If you are not doing it electronically, Google's Contact list is a good place to store the information. Your contact informa-tion is available to all Google's services you use like GMail and Google Voice.

Think too about your personal calendar. Do you frequently leave your calendar behind during the day? Google Calendar is also handy. It can be set to send you reminder text messages or e-mails as often as you would like. It's Quick Add feature lets you avoid filling our forms by simply typing entries like "Dentist Friday at 2 PM". You can even text message your calendar from your cell phone with new appointments.

Comment on this column at insidenova.com. Let's get a dialog going. Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark's blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and the e-mail address is markstout@gmail.com.