In today's turbo-charged work environment, excellent organization can mean the difference between seizing a career opportunity and watching it fly by. A well-organized work space also means efficient invoicing, expensing and follow-up, which translates into dollars in your pocket -- or out the window. For home-based businesses, organization is doubly important. A good system can help set boundaries between home life and work life, giving more time to actually enjoy the freedom of being your own boss.

Julie Morgenstern, author of Organizing from the Inside Out and founder of Task Masters, a professional organizing service based in New York City, offers advice for organizing your home office. Morgenstern has helped organize everyone from small-business owners to top execs at major companies such as American Express, the New York City Mayor's Office and NBC News.

She offers tips to organize your home office:

1. Plan Before You Pounce
Skip that trip to Staples. Before loading up on nifty organizational devices, you have to figure out what goes where, what you're keeping and what you're throwing out. "Analyze, strategize, then attack."

2. Set Aside Sufficient Time
Most offices take three days to completely overhaul. You're not just clearing clutter; you're also establishing your priorities. "Organizing is about identifying what's important to you and giving yourself access to it," Morgenstern explains.

3. Assess Your Location
Before you start organizing, make sure your office is in the right place. You're going to spend most of the day here. Don't banish yourself to a room you don't like. "Often, people plan to put their office in a spare bedroom they never use," Julie says. "Except they hate that dark, isolated room and wind up doing all their work on the dining room table." If you like working in the dining room, put your office there. You'll find creative ways to organize your things -- such as putting containers in the credenza -- to free up the table for dinner.

4. Use Morgenstern's Kindergarten Classroom Model
Once you've established your office area, divide it like a kindergarten classroom into activity zones. Each zone has everything needed for that activity. In kindergarten, zones are arts and crafts, music and reading. What are your main activities? Client contact, research, writing and mailing assembly? Divide your office into these four task areas and put everything related to each task in its own zone.

5. Organize for Retrieval, Not Storage
When deciding where to put specific items in each activity zone, focus on finding them, not storing them. Ask yourself, "Under what circumstance would I be looking for this?" and "Where would I go to look for this in the future?" not, "What box would this fit in?"

6. Create a User-Friendly Filing System
Take the kindergarten approach to filing too. Ditch that old A-Z system. It tends to separate related materials, putting accounting under "A," financial plan under "F" and tax records under "T." Instead, create separate filing drawers or areas for the categories of your home business: finances, clients, administrative and marketing, for example. Put all related files in the appropriate drawer in alphabetical order, if you wish.

7. Customize to Fit the Way You Think
There is no correct organizational system. Your system needs to make sense to you. "Once I was working with a woman who was a very successful storyteller, a very creative person," Morgenstern says. "She had one drawer in which she kept the names of places where she spoke or might speak. I said, 'Oh, that's your marketing drawer.' She said, 'Oh no! I hate marketing.' She preferred to think of it as sharing her stories with the world. We decided to call the drawer, 'Sharing It with the World.' That worked for her. Sharing really motivated and inspired her."

8. Complete One Section at a Time
That coffee cup on your desk belongs in the kitchen. You bring it to the kitchen and realize you need to organize your spice rack. Don't do this. Focus on one room at time. Within that room, complete one section before moving to the next. You need to see results to feel inspired enough to continue.

9. Don't Quit
Organizing is such a huge task, people often quit before finishing. Invariably, those remaining little piles of clutter take over the office, reducing it to chaos again.

Plan strategies ahead of time to keep yourself motivated. Write a list of reasons to get organized and post it where you can see it. Take before and after photos of your space to track your progress. Work with a buddy who will keep you inspired and serve as a sounding board. For your new system to stick, you need to see it through to the end. Reward yourself at each stage of the process.

10. Organize Time to Get out in the World
The goal of all this planning is not only to have a successful business, but also to enjoy a fulfilling life. Make sure to plan time to get out of your fabulous new office and into the world, too.