A professor needs to have an office that is organized to stay on top of all the work you need to do.
One way of making sure you keep your office at work organized is to make sure you do keep a lot of papers and assignments hanging around. Take the time to neatly organize these assignments and file them away. One way you can avoid dealing with paper at all is to maintain a paper-free assignment policy with your students. If you use e-mail to have students send you their assignments and mark it using tools in Microsoft Word, this will make sure that you do not have a lot of paper to deal with in your work.
Another way to make sure you are keeping your work environment organized is to make sure your keyboard is clean, as well as the telephone and anything else you may share with other professors. Even if you do not share these facilities, it is still a good idea to keep them clean.
At home, make sure you empty out your waste basket and give a good sweep to the floor of your home office. It is ideal to have home office space, or to at least designate an area as your work space. Make sure you keep all documents organized and file – it is extremely useful to have a filing system and cabinet in your home office, as well as something like this at work.
