The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success, and two of its key focuses are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Many entrepreneurs must set up offices at home to carry out their operations, and this space can be critical for concentration and production. Some aspects will make your space more conducive to productivity. The following contributed post is therefore entitled, 3 Suggestions for Setting up a Home Office.
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Image via Pixabay
Whether you want to embark on an entrepreneurial path and chart your own professional destiny in life, as your own boss, or whether you just want a quiet place to sit, journal, and reflect — a home office is a fantastic and multi-dimensional gift to give yourself.
A good home office should be a place where you can shut out the concerns of the outside world, and invest yourself wholeheartedly in whatever endeavour you’re pursuing. It should be a self-enclosed dimension where you can pen that novel you’ve been working on, produce your blog posts for the next week, or even just read and absorb a book without any significant external distractions.
Of course, a good home office has certain traits. Here are some suggestions for getting your home office set up to a decent standard, in short order.
Your chair is your most important tool — choose one that you can bear to sit in for hours at a stretch
Adjustable standing desks can be a great addition to any office, since it’s good to alternate periods spent seated with periods spent on your feet and moving around, for overall health reasons. In reality, though, you are likely going to spend the vast majority of your time in your home office sitting down.
Your chair is, therefore, your most important home office tool. It has to be something that you can bear to sit in for hours at a stretch. Ideally, it will even be a pleasant experience, as much of your ability to do productive work, or absorb information, will rely on your not being simultaneously distracted by physical discomfort.
Address every aspect of what make for a good office chair. Make sure it’s well-padded. See that it has the best caster wheels for ease of movement. Check that the back support works for you.
Eliminate all distractions from the area, to the best of your ability
The famous author Stephen King has written that authors should “close the door” while working on their books — at least until the draft is ready for other eyes. In this context, he uses “close the door” both literally and figuratively, and advises aspiring authors to work in isolation, to filter out distractions, and to keep their work hidden from prying eyes during the early drafts.
Though this advice was intended for authors, it can be applied to anyone who writes, or has any sort of creative or thoughtful work to attend to, at all.
A distraction-free environment reduces procrastination, boosts productivity, and aids focus. Ensure your home office doesn’t feature TVs, videogames, or anything else of the sort.
Keep the space tidy — an organised desk (and office), means an organised mind
With the constant flow of information that we’re all exposed to, courtesy of the internet and other modern technologies, many of us suffer from chronically disordered thinking, and an inability to strategise and focus.
Keeping your home office space meticulously tidy can help to counteract this chronic low-level chaos, and aid clear thinking.
It seems to be the case, psychologically speaking, that when our immediate environments are messy, cluttered, chaotic and disordered, our thoughts come to be so as well. By contrast, an orderly, neat, and well-structured environment promotes focused and structured states of mind.
