Tips for Being Productive at Home

The home office has long been a staple in American households. It’s that spare room with your computer and the spare futon where guests sleep when they visit. Maybe it’s a space you share with your family or housemates. Or perhaps it’s the junk room that catches the overflow of all your stuff, from the ironing board to your workout equipment.

Unless you already work at home for a living, you may not have given the space very much design consideration or designated it off-limits to the rest of the family. But as more and more people follow stay-at-home orders or are being told to stay away from the office, the home office suddenly has become the most important room in the house — and the most-used.

Where’s My Favorite Pen?

Whether you’re new to the home office experience or have enjoyed the benefits of working in your sweats for a while, now is a good time to take a closer look at your home office set-up. It’s time to make it more functional. There’s a lot of design thought goes into the flow and Feng Shui of a business working space. You can take some of that combined wisdom and incorporate it into your own home office.

Alternatively, if your living situation doesn’t allow you to have a designated space — with a door you can close — you can take steps to create a home office space where your necessary work tools are easily accessible and the ambiance is most conducive to productivity and success.

Can We Have the Room Please?

If you’re fortunate enough to have a room that you can turn into an office, free of outside interference (unless you invite it in), make it into a home office that inspires and supports your efforts. Plenty has been written about how to stay healthy while working from home, including recent Ray Access blogs about minimizing distractions and how to stay healthy working at a computer all day.

Add a few more less obvious strategies to your home office, and you may just find that working from home makes you a better employee, boss or contractor. For example, make time to:

• Organize. You waste more time looking for documents or your favorite pen when your home office is disorganized than trying to find a movie to watch on Netflix. You don’t have to buy new filing cabinets or bookcases to organize your home office — although that may be a great investment of your stimulus money. “A place for everything and everything in its place” is a long held tenet of good organization because you can:
  • Put things back in the same place from which you got them.
  • Mark files clearly … both on your hard drive and in your desk drawers.
  • Use coffee cups, baskets, shelves and drawers to keep tools you rely on every day.
  • Make sensible piles designated for separate projects or tasks.
  • Place notes and reminders where you can see them.
  • Clean up your space every evening so you can start fresh in the morning.
• Visualize. Lighting in your office makes a huge difference in how you feel during your working hours and how effective you communicate. When you walk into your home office, the lighting should make you feel relaxed and ready. The right lighting improves your efficiency, increases your energy, affects your mood and reduces headaches and eyestrain. It also plays an important factor in how you look in your online meetings. Even born blind, Helen Keller knew that “knowledge is love and light and vision.” To maximize the light:
  • Allow as much natural light as you can from outside into your home office.
  • Face your desk to the windows to prevent glare and optimize your view.
  • Rely on wall sconces or other lamps throughout the room for ambient light.
  • Reduce dependence on overhead lights.
  • Use a task light on your desk to ease eye strain and improve your focus.
  • Keep direct light off your face and make the room as muted as possible when interacting on a live internet feed.
• Compromise. When you can’t set up your home office in a room designated specifically for that purpose alone, you can still make your time at work more productive and efficient with a few modifications. Not only does working from your bed or leaning over a coffee table in the living room make for a sore body, but it also makes it more difficult to concentrate, stay on task and get as much out of your working hours as possible. But if your living situation means “sharing is caring,” then it’s vital you get everyone in your household on board to respect your space and do a little compromising themselves so you can continue to bring home a paycheck. Try to:
  • Use shelves and screens to divide a room and isolate your workspace.
  • Invest in a rolling file cabinet if you have to move around to find workspace.
  • Use headphones for meetings and alert others when you’re on a call to prevent as much background interference as possible.
  • Create a work space with a small desk in an otherwise used room that has a door, like your bedroom, attic, walk-in closet or she-shed.
  • Set aside specific times for your kids to do schoolwork, plan quiet activities or make movie dates for others in your household at the same time you’re working — and make sure you have enough internet bandwidth to accommodate multiple users at one time.
  • Be as flexible as your work allows. Your family shouldn’t be the only ones making compromises. Get up early before others rise or stay up later to work after others have gone to bed. Arrange your schedule around their activities. Be reasonable and don’t set yourself up for conflicts that could be avoided with prior planning and prioritizing.

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