Wherever you’re working, be it at home, the office or the factory, storage is at a premium. You may have storage cabinets for important documents, or mobile racking for tools, but it seems that you can never have enough, especially for things like office stationary.

The storage of pens, paper clips and pencils, for example, is easily achieved by using a desk tidy. These can be made from household objects or bought online.

Making a desk tidy is fun and individual to you. One idea worth considering is to use the lid from a spindle of DVDs, turn it over with the cover resting on the desk. A small, empty plastic bottle cut to the appropriate height could then be fixed to the centre or to one side of the lid, and you have a pen and pencil holder with a space for paper clips or staples in the inverted lid.

Alternatively, if your desk has drawers, it might be a good idea to use an old cutlery organiser to keep pens and so forth tidied into one place. The organiser would also be a good place for the storage of USB sticks which can be a nightmare to find once they have been misplaced.

Stacking books on the desk’s top may look fine, but when you want to consult one particular volume and it is at the bottom of the stack it can be problematic. Try to store them across the back of the desk, possibly with two small stacks of books as bookends.