5 tips to maximise your home office efficiency

One of the biggest things about any office space is how much work can get done there. This is vitally important for your home office and something that you need to seriously consider before you take the dive and relocate to a home office space. Whether your home office is where you’re burning the midnight oil or if you work full time out of your home office, the urgency is no less real. Here are 5 tips to maximize your home office efficiency and tackle the work that’s before you.

Distractions
Maybe the first thing you need to do when you’re creating your home office is you need to eliminate distractions. That means no TV (unless it’s necessary for your job), no radio (again, unless required), and you should be working in as sterile a space as possible. Imagine your cubicle desk just plopped into your home; that’s what the space of your workspace and immediately surrounding should look like.

Tools
The world wasn’t built without sweat and labor and while the tools required to make your home office efficient aren’t nearly as physical that doesn’t make them any less important. Google makes several tools which should already be in your arsenal like Google Documents and Google Calendar as well as the search engine, of course. Then you will want to have the latest version of Skype to have meetings with others directly. Another tool which really makes sense in this increasingly digital world is Carbonite so that you can back up all your information to their backup server as it is saved.

Ergonomics
Some people may say hogwash to having a comfortable place to sit and that they did fine for 30 years in a fold out desk chair but these are the same people who today have arthritis and other directly attributable health maladies. Making sure you have a comfortable chair to sit in will not only make your home office more comfortable for you but it will also make it far more functional and will make you more productive.

Meal Clock
Just because you are lucky enough to be working at home doesn’t mean you have to work 20 hour days. You need to have a punch in and punch out time; just like in the office. You need to be able to take bathroom breaks, you need to be able to take meal breaks, and you need to be able to leave the job when the day is done. You also should probably have a coffee pot of some kind in your home office if you drink coffee or some mini-fridge so that you don’t have to keep entering the “kitchen” and the “home-life world.” The more distinct and separate you can make the spaces the more efficient you are likely to be.

De-Clutter
A final strategy is to get rid of all your clutter as it comes in. Maybe you’ve got an off-site storage space to bring all your paperwork, contracts, and physical media that you don’t need right away but could have use for at some point down the line. You don’t want to introduce clutter into your already compromised home office space but you don’t want to discard something which you could need to have access to in six days or six months.

If you remember these 5 tips for keeping your home office both efficient and smooth running you will have great success at making your home life and your home office life mutual, exclusive, and somewhat sophisticated.

0 Comments