Anyone who regularly works from home can benefit from a dedicated home office. Below are 10 design tips for making your home office as awesome as possible.
Choose Your Space Carefully
If you want to get as much as you can out of your home office, and if you are aspiring to create a space that encourages productivity and enables you to power through whatever work needs to be done, you are going to need to choose the right space. Think about the ambient noise, the natural light levels, even the average temperature of the room throughout the year. You need somewhere comfortable.
Make Sure You Have Plenty of Room
Regardless of the type of work you are doing, it is always better to give yourself more room than you think you’ll need. Trying to work in cramped quarters can have a negative impact on your productivity, not to mention the harm it can do to your mood.
Find the Right Furniture
You don’t want a home office that is sterile and uninviting. Instead, you should aim to fill it with the kind of furniture that makes you want to be in there working. Don’t go so casual that you end up creating more of a rec room than a home office, but don’t feel like you have to restrict yourself to office furniture either.
Minimise the Distractions
Procrastination is the enemy of productivity. If you know that you are someone who is easily distracted and prone to procrastination, keeping the number of distractions surrounding you to a minimum will make it much easier to maintain your focus.
Be Creative with Your Storage Solutions
Any fully-equipped home office needs to provide plenty of shelf and storage space. If you have a job that requires you to frequently refer to textbooks, case files, or other documents, then being able to easily keep them organised will make your life easier.
Ensure Adequate Lighting
You should try to choose a room that provides plenty of natural light for your home office. But in terms of artificial lighting, try to stick to gentle lighting that isn’t going to encourage you to work into the small hours when you should be getting sleep.
Keep It Clean and Organized
Try to get into the habit of tidying your home office at the end of every day so that you can begin the day with a clean and organised space. Keeping your home office tidy will aid your productivity.
Make a Floor Plan
RoomSketcher is a nifty little app that makes it easy to design the precise layout of your home office. There are plenty of similar tools available in your browser; find one that works for you and use it to experiment with different layout ideas.
Use Dividers to Segment Your Space
Depending on the size of the space that you have to work with, you might want to divide the room into smaller sections. This is easily achieved by getting creative and using furniture to form impromptu dividers.
Think About Your Colour Scheme
It’s easy to underestimate the impact that a room’s colour scheme can have on how you feel when you are in it. For example, blue has a calming effect on many people, whereas reds and oranges tend to elicit stimulation. Try to keep your space light and avoid overly saturated colours.
Whether working from home is a daily occurrence or an occasional thing, it is always helpful to have a dedicated space. With a little bit of thought and work, you can create a home office so awesome that you actually enjoy being in there.
Do you work from home? If so, are there any other ideas that worked for you but are not listed here?
