Last year I rearranged my office space to give me room for a new bookcase – never have too many bookcases I say! The purpose for this bookcase is to keep the books I use daily, or weekly, in order. There has been so many times that I lose a book – I don’t know how I lose a book – afterall, I had it only yesterday!! But if there is no proper place for things it is all too easy for something to get lost – even temporarily!

I love this system – it really works for me.

I call these boxes my Workboxes – I fill them each week with the resources and lesson plans that I need to teach my children. This takes two shelves of my book case.


The other shelves are things that I refer to often, such as:

  • Notes for all my projects on hand – but that is another system altogether! I’ll share that another time.
  • the kids finished work files – waiting for me to check over
  • Character resources, writing resources, parenting resources
  • writing / publishing projects
  • Audios I want to listen to, books I want to read, DVD’s I want to see!

Before this bookcase I used to keep my daily/weekly books in a box. That worked well when I had 2 kids I was teaching but the more kids I had to balance the trickier it became. I also like that these books are in my office as I can sit down and do my planning and everything is at my fingertips.

I used to think that the kitchen was the hub of my home but as Jess and I were talking this week about systems I think the office is more the place where everything gets organised and managed. Maybe the kitchen is the relational hub – but the office certainly has its place too!