Do you need a home office space, or are you preparing to work from home? Many businesses switched to a home run model during the COVID-19 pandemic. If Microsoft bosses are to be believed, working from home causes issues with productivity and efficiency. This might be the case if you don’t have the right setup and aren’t considering certain key factors. But it doesn’t have to be an issue. With that in mind, let’s explore the steps you can take to ensure that your home office space will stay efficient and productive from day one.
Keep It Comfortable
First, you must ensure that your home office space is comfortable. We’re not talking about home comforts here. Instead, we’re referring to an ergonomic design. What does this mean exactly? You need to ensure that your workspace isn’t going to cause issues. The aim is always to avoid pain or significant levels of discomfort.
To understand why this is important, you need to think about the most common type of injury in the American workplace today. It’s not falling down the stairs. Instead, it’s RSI or repetitive strain injury. As the name suggests, this is caused by repeating the same movement constantly, often in a poor position without breaks. So, you could develop RSI in your wrists from typing. That is avoidable with an ergonomic design that considers issues like this. You can get ergonomic tech, chairs and tables. For instance, you may want to consider investing in a sit-stand desk. As the name suggests, this means that you can sit or stand to work, providing you with significantly more freedom throughout the work day.
Design It Right
If you want to be efficient in your home office, then it’s got to be designed properly. In the same way, a business owner would hire an interior designer to complete the office design; you should look up tips from the best in the business to get you on the right track. One of the most important things that you’re going to need to think about is colour association.
This is where your brain associates certain colours with certain feelings and moods. For example, the brain typically associates royal blue with intelligence and brown with boring. The last thing that you need is to feel bored all day, so brown is not the colour you want to go for.
You also need to ensure that your furniture is set up properly. It should be easy for you to access everything in your business office without much effort!
Choose The Best Tech
Next, you must ensure that you choose the right tech type. We’ve already discussed ergonomic design. But it is worth thinking about this when choosing your technology too. For instance, you need a keyboard that doesn’t require massive strain from your fingers to press the keys. You may want to research the best keyboards for home working to avoid issues here.
You should also think about your monitor setup. Some people will benefit from having dual or triple monitors to work with. This means you won’t constantly switch between different windows throughout the work day. That is going to slow you right down and cause problems when you are working on a tight deadline.
Speed is important too. If your tech runs too slowly, it will cause trouble. That’s why you should always think about the type of work you are completing before settling on the best computer that matches your needs.
Maintain Your Tech
Each piece of tech you own will need to be well-maintained. The downside of working from home is that you do not have your own IT department to handle things like this, so it’s down to you to keep on top of it. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but it’s important that your tech stays up-to-date and correctly maintained so that you can stay efficient and productive.
If you don’t know anything about maintaining tech, you need to learn a few tricks about cleaning the hard drive, speeding up slow-performing computers, and keeping the tech up to date.
If you notice that your tech is starting to deteriorate past the point of no return, you need to start looking for new pieces as soon as possible. Do not continue to try and use a device that isn’t working, as all it will do is hinder you both efficiency-wise and productivity-wise, which is the last thing that you need.
Avoid Distractions
Finally, we want to say that you should do your best to avoid distractions at all costs. When you’re working from home, it’s super easy to get distracted by the things in your home as you are less likely to be in a working mindset. You could wander out of your home office and step into the place where you feel most comfortable, which can be quite dangerous.
To successfully avoid distractions, we recommend that you don’t have anything in your office that isn’t related to work. Every piece of furniture and every file in the office should be relevant to the work that you are going to be completing. As well as this, it’s important that you try not to stay in your office during break hours. This is because if you do, you’re constantly wondering what’s happening on the other side of the door, but if you go out when you’re not working, you can satisfy your curiosity.
We hope that you have found this article helpful and now see some of the things you should be doing to stay efficient and productive in your home office. The last thing you need is your home office set-up slowing you down because it’s nowhere near as good as the setup you would have in a business office. We wish you the very best of luck, and we hope you stay efficient and productive when working from.