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Working from home, for most people, isn’t the dream you might expect.
The ever-present threat of distractions such as the TV and, yes, your family, make it hard to retain a decent level of productivity.
That is, unless you invest time in creating the best working space in your home. It’s not easy, but there are some tried-and-tested things you can do to ensure your home can be easily converted into a decent, productive working space.
One of the biggest challenges when working from home is the lack of any separation between your working life and that of your private life.
For instance, if you decide to set up camp in the kitchen and work there, when you’re finished, you’ll still be in the kitchen. This makes switching off rather tricky.
To avoid this, try and keep as much separation between your working area and the rest of the home as possible. If it’s the basement - perfect, but if you’re having to convert one half or corner of a room into your working space, section it off with a drape or piece of furniture.
A vitally important investment in your health will be the purchase of a chair and table for your working space at home.
Pick the wrong chair, and you’ll do your posture and back no favours. Pick a bad desk, and you simply won’t get enough work done.
If you’re going to spend relatively big on anything, make it on this aspect of your home office - you won’t regret it.
If room allows, make sure you have a couple of workspaces available in your home office.
By this, we mean, essentially, a couple of desks. A great way to do this is to invest in a normal desk and then create a standing desk. The latter could be a shelf, worktop or purpose-built standing desk, but having those two separate workstations will help considerably with your productivity.
This again depends on how much space you have and the room you’ve chosen for the home office, but light is vitally important - particularly natural light.
With that in mind, choose an area or room that has a big window, and let as much of that light in as possible.
It’s also important to furnish your office with greenery, because the presence of a plant or two will relax you and just make it a far nicer place in which to get stuff done.
Get your home office right, and you probably won’t want to leave it, but that can be a problem in itself.
Spending too much time in your home office might result in you being cut-off from the rest of the world, and there’s nothing worse than forgetting that there’s life outside of your home.
Set yourself a rota (either mentally or physically in your diary) that puts you in the home office for a portion of the week and elsewhere for the rest (the head office, the local coffee shop - wherever else you can get work done).
Remember - this isn’t about converting your entire home into a working space - more picking one room or area and making that the area in which you get stuff done.
Follow or tips above and working from home will be the dream you’d hoped it would be!