Tips for Setting Up Your Home Office

By Shannon Belew -April 18, 2020

Working from home offers many advantages, including the flexibility of setting your own schedule, saving time and money by eliminating your daily commute, and allowing you to start a business with minimal overhead. But being successful in a home office requires creating a space that promotes efficiency in a non-traditional work environment.

You'll want to define a professional work area that separates your business from your personal life whether you're self-employed or telecommuting. Its location, lighting, and confinement of clutter are all important.

1. Identify What You Need

What you'll need in your office will depend on the type of work you do. You might require both a small desk for your computer and a larger table or workspace for your artwork if you're a graphic artist.

2. Choose a Dedicated Area

Ideally, your office should be in a quiet area that allows you some privacy. This is especially important if you share the house with a spouse, children, or roommates. You might find that a spare room with a door can reduce noise from the rest of the house if you'll be on the phone frequently. It could make sense to choose a room near the front entrance of the house if you'll be meeting with clients in your home office.

3. Consider the Light

Set up your home office so it has plenty of light. You'll do your best work if some of that includes natural light. Warm light, such as from firelight, promotes relaxation. Cold light, such as daylight, improves productivity and alertness. That's what you want in your home office.

4. Use a Dedicated Phone

Having a dedicated phone for your home office, including a cell phone or a VoIP—Internet-based—phone, can allow you to separate your work and personal life, maintaining boundaries that can help both you and your customers.

5. Set Aside a Place for Gadgets

It's easy to become distracted when you don't have a supervisor or manager looking over your shoulder all the time, and this is especially true if you keep your gadgets with you in your office. You might occasionally need to use your devices for work, but your home office will be a more productive space if you have a dedicated spot where you store your smartphone, tablet, and other gadgets when they're not in use.

6. Separate the Professional From the Personal

Keep your personal life from spilling over into your business life—and vice versa. Setting up a business bank account is the first step in helping you avoid mixing personal expenses with your business expenses.Store personal checks, mail, client records, and financial records in a dedicated spot in your office, rather than with personal documents.

7.Have a Way to Keep Time

Research has found that you'll be more productive if you get up and move around a bit throughout the day.These brief mental rest periods break up the workday and can improve your focus, but it's easy to forget about time when you're working from home. Before you know it, you've worked 14 hours for the third day in a row.

Workers in a home office are more likely to overwork than those in a traditional workspace. Have some way in place to track time in your office, whether it's a clock on the wall or the alarm on your phone. Tracking time will encourage you to break up your workday effectively, and it will help you maintain regular work hours and a healthy work-life balance .

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