Desk and chair from De La Espada.
You suddenly find yourself having to work from home and now you have come to learn that it may be for a considerable time. Adjustments are needed. That corner nook you appropriated or the coffee table by the sofa which you thought would be fine for a couple of days may seem less fine if you are going to be working there for a while.
Make a Home Office That Suits Your Needs
Let’s home up the home. We are all spending a lot more time in ours than usual, and a lot of the little things that we could ignore have become major irritants. The biggest change could be your new-found work from home #WFH situation. This is your chance to re-make the dull, enforced sameness of the work office, that drab conference room with its god-awful whiteboards, and all the other environmentally visual blandness you have put up with. Make your workspace conform to your needs. The best part? You are in total control of the thermostat.
Creating Space for Productivity
What would we need to really improve the productivity part of our lives? Here are a few things we have found that help:
- A big monitor to plug into your laptop
- A proper desk chair
- Dedicated space with a dedicated work desk
- Pretty things around you so your eyes have a nice place to rest
- Choose a north-facing window — the light will be even all day
- Flowers, not always, but sometimes so they will seem special
Customize Your Workspace for You
As someone who finds most corporate workspaces completely bizarre, I encourage you to celebrate your new-found freedom. From the romper-room child-play aesthetic of the tech world to the faux wood-paneled “We are very serious here” corporate board rooms, I find corporate workspaces utterly oppressive. There is a certain indifference to the needs of the individual that strikes me as oddly Soviet. I recognize that I am an outlier in my work needs, and perhaps a bit of a prince when it comes to these things. I can’t bear fluorescent or LED lights; I prefer a 60-watt incandescent bulb in a lamp with a shade. I like to be surrounded by my books, my art, and work in a room with no outdoor-facing window at all. My office at AGEIST has all of these. I leave the windows with the views to my colleagues who seem to enjoy them.
The point is, we are all different, and this is your moment to customize your workspace so that it best suits your needs — not anyone else’s.
