I’ve worked from home almost my entire adult life, and while I’m fairly certain that it’s the best decision I’ve ever made, it hasn’t always been fun, and it certainly hasn’t always been productive. It can take years to compile a home office design that works well for you, but even then, job descriptions change and new folks come into our lives, resulting in a change in how we conduct our personal world around our working world.
Luckily, ergonomics (the study of efficient work environments) has taught us some neat tricks about working from home.
Let’s take a look at seven of them.
1. Keep Your Personal Life in a Separate Room
You need to keep distractions to a minimum when working from home, so you should never work in your comfort zone. For example: the kitchen is for eating, the common space is for socializing, the bedroom is for sleeping, and so the office is for working. Being comfortable, especially in bed, is a one-way threshold to Netflix and chill. You need to establish those boundaries early on, because they can quickly become bad habits.
2. Establish Boundaries with Your Housemates
By housemates I mean the other individuals that you live with (this includes husbands, wives and children). Housemates need to understand that there are boundaries, that you cannot be distracted or take on responsibilities such as housework or babysitting children. Just because you’re at home, it doesn’t mean that you’re available and these rules should be respected.
It may be difficult to explain this to younger children who might crave your attention at random, so tread carefully and make sure that you don’t neglect family time after work.
3. Don’t Buy Too Much Equipment
It can be quite tempting to equip the hell out of your workspace with fancy tablet stands, extra monitors and screens, USB cooling fans and God knows what else, but after a while you’ll start to realize that a lot of your equipment is doing nothing but hogging space (unless you’re Iron-Man, of course). The real question is: normal desk or standing desk?
Don’t force yourself to keep equipment that you don’t need — sell it to somebody that might need it and be modest about your own home setup. If you haven’t bought any equipment yet, save yourself some bucks and start off simple; buy equipment to solve the issues you already have, not the issues you might encounter.
4. Don’t Commit to Your Home Office Design Too Much
It’s important to remember that an outside world does in fact exist. You don’t want to emerge from your dwelling years later to find that cars with wheels are obsolete and you now have a serious Vitamin D deficiency (even if you did manage to reach “Inbox Zero”!). Every now and then, you need to actually leave the house and integrate with the outside world, maintain your social skills, improve your mental clarity and enjoy a nice beer and burger in the sun!
Note: another to reason to become equipment-independent!
Continue reading %7 Ways You Can Design Your Home Office for Maximum Productivity%
by Daniel Schwarz via SitePoint
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