Return-to-office mandates have been pervasive in the technology sector over the last year or so, but recent statistics suggest that about a quarter of workers in the United States still work remotely at least part of the time.
If you’re one of the millions who are fortunate enough to work in your pajamas, you have a home office – and even if your “office” happens to be a chair in your living room, it still counts.
What’s your long-term goal as a remote worker? Many people might answer that question by saying that they’re like to stay in their current arrangement as long as possible.
Working from home allows you to avoid wasting your time on daily commutes and helps to promote a healthy work-life balance.
What’s the best way to maintain your current arrangement as an at-home worker? One way to do that is by making yourself irreplaceable, and a good way to be irreplaceable is by ensuring that you’re more productive than any in-person worker could ever be.
Do you want to make your time working at home as productive as it can possibly be? Start by evaluating the space where you work.
If you see dust, clutter and poor lighting everywhere you look, you’re almost definitely not accomplishing as much as you could. Here’s how to turn any home office into a more productive space.
Give Your Office and Computer a Good Cleaning
If you want to make your home office a more productive space, the best way to begin is by ensuring that you enjoy the time you spend there – and you can start by giving the space a good cleaning.
If you see piles of dust everywhere you look, that’s not going to be good for your ability to focus on the task at hand.
One good approach for cleaning a home office is to start by removing as many of the items from the room as possible. That way, you can give the floor, walls and ceiling a good cleaning.
You can also dust your desk and any other furniture without your computer and other items getting in the way. Clean the items as you bring them back into the room. You can also take this opportunity to eliminate clutter, which we’ll discuss next.
Don’t forget to give your computer a good cleaning because that’s where you focus the majority of your attention when you work. Clean the screen using a lint-free microfiber cloth dampened with a little water.
Compressed air can be useful for cleaning tight spaces such as the areas between the keys on your keyboard.
Remove the Clutter
While you’re cleaning your home office, you should take the opportunity to remove as much clutter as possible. Having a messy space causes stress and anxiety, which is the exact opposite of the mindset that you want when you’re at work.
If you have a dedicated home office, you should remove things not directly related to your work aside from decorations, pictures and other items that bring you joy and enhance the space. If you work in a shared area like a living room, you can still remove clutter without making the space less enjoyable for your family.
Improve the Air Quality
Have you ever thought about whether your home office is a healthy space in terms of air quality? There are actually studies showing that breathing polluted air is harmful for brain health – and you’d be surprised by how quickly the air quality can go south when you spend hours a day in an enclosed space.
Giving the room a thorough cleaning and dusting is a good start because it’ll help to control common allergens such as dust mites.
It’s also important, though, to consider the things that you do to improve or worsen the air quality in your home office. The fact that you can smoke when you work at home, for instance, definitely doesn’t mean you should.
Visit a vape shop and make the jump to vaping instead. You might also want to consider investing in an air filter with activated charcoal and HEPA stages.
Improve the Lighting
Light quality has an enormous impact on your ability to concentrate and maintain a healthy circadian rhythm. The enormous fluorescent lights that illuminate many traditional offices are horrible for both of those things, and many people find that they also cause headaches.
One of the best things about working at home is that you get to control the lighting, so it’s worthwhile to invest a bit of time and money into figuring out what sort of lighting scheme works best for you.
Natural light is always best, so it’s a good idea to arrange your home office to allow maximum sunlight to enter the room. Position your screen at a right angle to the incoming sunlight to prevent glare.
If natural lighting isn’t a possibility in your home office, then you should pay attention to the light bulbs in the room. You don’t want to use bulbs that produce excessive blue light, and you definitely don’t want to use bulbs that flicker visibly.
Look for bulbs that have a high Color Rendering Index (CRI), which measures how close a bulb’s color spectrum is to that of natural sunlight. Incandescent bulbs and sunlight both score 100 on this scale. The best LED bulbs have CRI scores of 97 and higher.
Get Organized
At this point, your home office should be a healthy and clean space – and hopefully a place where you look forward to spending time every day. The final step is to remove all remaining sources of friction between you and the task at hand.
That means it’s time to get organized – and organizing means bringing order to both your space and your brain.
- Remove the items on your desk or table – including things in the drawers – except the things that bring you joy or directly help you work. Make sure that your most important tools are readily available and that you know where they are.
- Use a system for organizing your tasks. One effective way to do that is by collecting your incoming tasks on a list – either on paper or on your computer. That way, when you complete a task, you can simply refer to the list instead of wasting time on trying to figure out what you should do next.