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Your Home Office Environment Matters – Here Are 4 Tips for Getting It Right
(This is a contributed post)
If you’re getting started as an entrepreneur, and are looking forward to embracing the work-from-home lifestyle – or, if you’ve been living that lifestyle for a while already, but feel like things aren’t quite organised enough – setting up a proper home office environment is very important.
When your home office environment is well-organised, tidy, and professional, it can go a long way to making you feel motivated and focused enough to get your work done, to a high standard, day after day.
On the other hand, when your “home office” is your bed or sofa, you’re likely to feel pretty chaotic, and will probably struggle to maintain focus, and to draw the necessary distinctions between your private life, and your professional life.
So, without further ado, here are some tips for getting your home office environment right, so that it helps you to get the most out of your working life, instead of being an obstacle to peak productivity.
Give the entire area a real, good clean
It’s difficult to feel properly motivated, focused, and switched on, when you’re working in a space that is simply dirty, covered in dust, that’s likely to trigger allergies, and that just doesn’t do you any favours in general.
Begin setting up your home office space by giving it a real, good clean. Start by dusting and vacuuming, and then get to the more complicated tasks.
If your home office is really dirty, you might even want to visit Steamaster in order to take the cleaning operation up to the next level.
If, after your best cleaning efforts, your home office is still a place the triggers allergies, and that makes you feel uncomfortable, you might want to consider investing in a HEPA air filter in order to improve the experience a bit more.
Organise your home office so that everything is perfectly within your control
Your home office environment should be a place where you are in complete control, to the greatest of your ability.
Every item in the place should be carefully organised and assigned to a particular location, and you should have a perfect idea of how the room is structured, where you can find what it is you’re looking for at a moments notice, and so on.
Generally speaking, one of the main points of having a home office, to begin with, is that it delineates an “orderly” location where you can really get some work done, to a high standard, and in a structured and deliberate way.
If, on the other hand, your home office environment is chaotic – with belongings strewn haphazardly around, and no clear sense of where things are, or how things work – you’re just not going to be in the right headspace to work diligently and productively.
Decorate the office environment in a way that motivates peak focus and productivity
You’ve probably heard that many professional sports stars have little superstitions that they take really seriously during the course of their careers. Maybe there will be a particular talisman, or item of clothing that they wear for each game, or maybe there’ll be a very specific pre-game snack they’ll have.
The same sorts of “superstitious” rituals can be found among some great writers and artists, who often have little ornaments, tokens, and routines that they take pretty seriously, in order to stay on point, and do their best work.
You could get mystical about all of this, but you don’t have to. The bottom line is that anything that can help to get you into a “flow” state of peak focus and productivity, can radically improve our odds of being successful in your professional life.
Certain ornaments and rituals can act as potent psychological anchors, to put you into that “flow” state in a hurry. So, decorate your home office environment in a way that motivates peak focus and productivity. Don’t be afraid to set up slightly goofy ornaments if they help you “get into the zone.”
Make sure to create a clear psychological divide between your office space and your normal home environment
When you’re working from home, there’s a major risk that you will find yourself giving in to the temptation to procrastinate, watch TV, take an extended nap in your own bed, and just generally blur the lines between work and private life, on a regular basis.
A huge part of a successful home office environment, is that it should help to clarify the psychological divide between your office space and your normal home environment, to prevent this from happening.
So – keep your home office area for work. There should be no TV in the room, no games console, and you should take steps to ensure that it’s not too easy for you to just wander off and check social media every few minutes, either.
