If there is ever anything as “stationery responsibility”, where people are required to be conscious about their stationery and put them in a good place at all times, very many of us would be tagged irresponsible. We often take home and office stationery for granted and would only ensure that they are always in a good state when they have become exhausted.
Proper equipping of your home or office with essential stationery makes life a whole lot easier. For example, stacking your files and notes on each other without properly organizing them using a folder can make the whole place look unkempt. There is also a high chance you might lose some of those files in no time.
Stationery is required for the proper running of your office. They also find essential uses in the home as well. Here is a list of 10 essential stationery for your home and office needs.
Essential Stationery For Your Home And Office Needs
1. Pens
Having a number of pens is essential for proper recording of thoughts and ideas in the home or office. According to the words of David Allen, “your head is for having ideas, not holding them”. It’s normal to forget stuff, especially those new ideas that are just floating in our heads.
Even though pens are not new to all of us, it is important to re-emphasize that pens are essential and must-have stationery for your home and office.
Regular pens are vital for scribbling down your fast thoughts and quickly noting a new task on your to-do list. A fountain pen can be useful if you need to sign a letter or an official document that requires special embellishment. Markers are also an important type of pen that can be used to draw illustrations, label packages, and so on.
Finally, colored pens and highlighters can be particularly essential for marking text, adding structural context to your work, categorizing your tasks into order e.g, deadlines, urgent tasks, family or customer-related tasks.
2. Plain Papers
Plain papers are basic must-have stationery for every home and office but ironically, a few people do not see their importance or take them seriously at all. As usual, a day comes when they realize that they could need plain paper only to discover they have never made arrangements for some.
Plain papers are essential stationery for your home and office needs – as sheets for writing down thoughts, ideas, sketches, some new ideas going through your mind, and also for printing documents from your computer. It will never be out of place to get at least a bundle of plain papers in your home or office, will it?
3. Stickers
Stickers come in different forms, sizes, and colors. They are small and sticky papers you can stick to the wall or any other solid surface after you might have written important information on them. They help you remember important information in summarized forms.
They are essential stationery useful in categorizing and labeling things in your home and office. Several color-coded stickers can be used to identify items or events belonging to a particular category. If you are working in a public office with several other people, you might want to label your things to avoid being used up by colleagues at work. Stickers can be helpful in doing this.
Colored stickers, especially those with interesting shapes like circles, stars, etc, are excellent tools for presenting important information to children. If your job directly involves children or the children in the home need some form of control and orderliness, being creative with stickers can be very helpful.
For example, you can add stars to their names on a board, one at a time, for any good conduct they display. then reward the children with a more tangible prize after they accumulate a certain number of star stickers. This is to what extent you can get creative with this stationery.
4. Filing Folders
According to Havard Business Review, an international survey done revealed that information workers lose up to two hours a week fruitlessly searching for lost digital documents. Maybe two hours is an understatement compared to what you may have experienced or witnessed in reality.
Filing papers and documents in folders make them more organized, easier to access and saves you the rigor of having to look for hidden or lost files. Scientists at the Preston University Neuroscience Institute have also proven that constant visual reminders of disorderliness can drain our cognitive resources and reduce our ability to focus. The converse is also true, so why allow your files and documents in the home and office to get cluttered up when all you need to do are some filing folders?
I’d personally recommend a lever arch file for organizing your documents in one place. A lever arch file organizes and safeguards your paper documents from dust, fluid, and moisture and also makes it easy for you to flip through the pages when you need to locate a file.
Manilla dividers are essential for making files easy to locate. They are color-coded or text labels that can be attached to segments of your files or edges of pages, to help you locate particular documents or documentations. There are folders that come with these dividers but if not, you can manually add dividers to them.
5. Paper Puncher
A paper puncher is essential stationery for your home and office for several reasons. It is used to make holes on an edge of a paper that you want to keep in your lever arch file, especially. A paper puncher can also be used to make holes on paper for any other reasons, maybe attaching twine, making tiny paper pieces, etc.
6. Embossed Cards
Business cards are ubiquitous but if you want yours to stand out from the competition and get your prospective clients glued to you, you are going to have to do something different. Plain white business cards are easily discarded and forgotten among the mounds of other papers. Using an embossed logo on embossed paper can make it easier for clients to recall your company and the services it renders.
While this essential stationery sets your firm apart from your rivals’ with unattractive paper works, they can also be used to make special designs for special occasions or as a present to a friend or loved one.
7. Ruler
Common things occur commonly, so I hear some people say but in reality, common things are not as common as we’d expect. A ruler is by far one of the most basic stationery for any home or office but it is unavailable in many homes and offices. Much like most of the other essential stationeries listed here, a day comes when you need a ruler but realize you don’t have one.
8. Tape
I had not mentioned a pair of staplers in this post but they are equally essential stationeries for home or office. Staplers are used to pin together two or more sheets of paper or other similar materials. A tape also does that too.
A tape is often a ribbon-like material with glue on one side while the other side remains dry. It can be used to hold pieces together, organize items, and label or categorize objects especially if the material of the tape is made of paper. This essential stationery may look insignificant until you have a serious need for it but it is nowhere to be found.
9. Glue
Little tasks like attaching a passport where it is specified not to use pins, or fixing thick cardboard over another can be daunting when you do not have glue in your home or office. Glues are of different types depending on the specific use. Some glues hold stronger than others but in any case, having a liquid material that holds things together either temporarily or permanently would very important in the home and office.
10. Pair(s) of Scissors
As small as it may seem, scissors can sometimes be life-saving. A pair of scissors are useful for cutting papers into shapes and sizes, making the papers more usable to the user at certain times. They often come as two metallic blades with a pivot at the center and a plastic material overlying the handle. There are other types of scissors though, but for personal home and office work, a simple pair of scissors will be sufficient.
Why Have These Stationeries at Your Home And Office?
- Here are a few reasons why you should get these essential stationeries for your home and office use.
- Make work easier
- Enhance productivity
- Make your workspace more organized
- Better productivity when you are organized
- You are confident when you know that you have all your tools
- Project a positive image about your company of business
Final words
Not only is having stationery in your home and office extremely important but having these essential stationeries will save you unnecessary stress, make work easier, and even enhance your productivity. Some of these essential stationeries help you to organize your office and home, making your search for a document or part of a document pretty much easy.
The list of essential stationery for your home and office is limitless. There are many others but these are just a few of the accessories you can purchase for your home and office.
If there is ever anything as “stationery responsibility”, where people are required to be conscious about their stationery and put them in a good place at all times, very many of us would be tagged irresponsible. We often take home and office stationery for granted and would only ensure that they are always in a good state when they have become exhausted.
Proper equipping of your home or office with essential stationery makes life a whole lot easier. For example, stacking your files and notes on each other without properly organizing them using a folder can make the whole place look unkempt. There is also a high chance you might lose some of those files in no time.
Stationery is required for the proper running of your office. They also find essential uses in the home as well. Here is a list of 10 essential stationery for your home and office needs.
Essential Stationery For Your Home And Office Needs
1. Pens
Having a number of pens is essential for proper recording of thoughts and ideas in the home or office. According to the words of David Allen, “your head is for having ideas, not holding them”. It’s normal to forget stuff, especially those new ideas that are just floating in our heads.
Even though pens are not new to all of us, it is important to re-emphasize that pens are essential and must-have stationery for your home and office.
Regular pens are vital for scribbling down your fast thoughts and quickly noting a new task on your to-do list. A fountain pen can be useful if you need to sign a letter or an official document that requires special embellishment. Markers are also an important type of pen that can be used to draw illustrations, label packages, and so on.
Finally, colored pens and highlighters can be particularly essential for marking text, adding structural context to your work, categorizing your tasks into order e.g, deadlines, urgent tasks, family or customer-related tasks.
2. Plain Papers
Plain papers are basic must-have stationery for every home and office but ironically, a few people do not see their importance or take them seriously at all. As usual, a day comes when they realize that they could need plain paper only to discover they have never made arrangements for some.
Plain papers are essential stationery for your home and office needs – as sheets for writing down thoughts, ideas, sketches, some new ideas going through your mind, and also for printing documents from your computer. It will never be out of place to get at least a bundle of plain papers in your home or office, will it?
3. Stickers
Stickers come in different forms, sizes, and colors. They are small and sticky papers you can stick to the wall or any other solid surface after you might have written important information on them. They help you remember important information in summarized forms.
They are essential stationery useful in categorizing and labeling things in your home and office. Several color-coded stickers can be used to identify items or events belonging to a particular category. If you are working in a public office with several other people, you might want to label your things to avoid being used up by colleagues at work. Stickers can be helpful in doing this.
Colored stickers, especially those with interesting shapes like circles, stars, etc, are excellent tools for presenting important information to children. If your job directly involves children or the children in the home need some form of control and orderliness, being creative with stickers can be very helpful.
For example, you can add stars to their names on a board, one at a time, for any good conduct they display. then reward the children with a more tangible prize after they accumulate a certain number of star stickers. This is to what extent you can get creative with this stationery.
4. Filing Folders
According to Havard Business Review, an international survey done revealed that information workers lose up to two hours a week fruitlessly searching for lost digital documents. Maybe two hours is an understatement compared to what you may have experienced or witnessed in reality.
Filing papers and documents in folders make them more organized, easier to access and saves you the rigor of having to look for hidden or lost files. Scientists at the Preston University Neuroscience Institute have also proven that constant visual reminders of disorderliness can drain our cognitive resources and reduce our ability to focus. The converse is also true, so why allow your files and documents in the home and office to get cluttered up when all you need to do are some filing folders?
I’d personally recommend a lever arch file for organizing your documents in one place. A lever arch file organizes and safeguards your paper documents from dust, fluid, and moisture and also makes it easy for you to flip through the pages when you need to locate a file.
Manilla dividers are essential for making files easy to locate. They are color-coded or text labels that can be attached to segments of your files or edges of pages, to help you locate particular documents or documentations. There are folders that come with these dividers but if not, you can manually add dividers to them.
5. Paper Puncher
A paper puncher is essential stationery for your home and office for several reasons. It is used to make holes on an edge of a paper that you want to keep in your lever arch file, especially. A paper puncher can also be used to make holes on paper for any other reasons, maybe attaching twine, making tiny paper pieces, etc.
6. Embossed Cards
Business cards are ubiquitous but if you want yours to stand out from the competition and get your prospective clients glued to you, you are going to have to do something different. Plain white business cards are easily discarded and forgotten among the mounds of other papers. Using an embossed logo on embossed paper can make it easier for clients to recall your company and the services it renders.
While this essential stationery sets your firm apart from your rivals’ with unattractive paper works, they can also be used to make special designs for special occasions or as a present to a friend or loved one.
7. Ruler
Common things occur commonly, so I hear some people say but in reality, common things are not as common as we’d expect. A ruler is by far one of the most basic stationery for any home or office but it is unavailable in many homes and offices. Much like most of the other essential stationeries listed here, a day comes when you need a ruler but realize you don’t have one.
8. Tape
I had not mentioned a pair of staplers in this post but they are equally essential stationeries for home or office. Staplers are used to pin together two or more sheets of paper or other similar materials. A tape also does that too.
A tape is often a ribbon-like material with glue on one side while the other side remains dry. It can be used to hold pieces together, organize items, and label or categorize objects especially if the material of the tape is made of paper. This essential stationery may look insignificant until you have a serious need for it but it is nowhere to be found.
9. Glue
Little tasks like attaching a passport where it is specified not to use pins, or fixing thick cardboard over another can be daunting when you do not have glue in your home or office. Glues are of different types depending on the specific use. Some glues hold stronger than others but in any case, having a liquid material that holds things together either temporarily or permanently would very important in the home and office.
10. Pair(s) of Scissors
As small as it may seem, scissors can sometimes be life-saving. A pair of scissors are useful for cutting papers into shapes and sizes, making the papers more usable to the user at certain times. They often come as two metallic blades with a pivot at the center and a plastic material overlying the handle. There are other types of scissors though, but for personal home and office work, a simple pair of scissors will be sufficient.
Why Have These Stationeries at Your Home And Office?
- Here are a few reasons why you should get these essential stationeries for your home and office use.
- Make work easier
- Enhance productivity
- Make your workspace more organized
- Better productivity when you are organized
- You are confident when you know that you have all your tools
- Project a positive image about your company of business
Final words
Not only is having stationery in your home and office extremely important but having these essential stationeries will save you unnecessary stress, make work easier, and even enhance your productivity. Some of these essential stationeries help you to organize your office and home, making your search for a document or part of a document pretty much easy.
The list of essential stationery for your home and office is limitless. There are many others but these are just a few of the accessories you can purchase for your home and office.
