
Set Up Your Home Office for Focus and Productivity
I love working from home. The leisurely mornings with no commute, control over the thermostat, the ability to move my clothes to the dryer while my code is compiling…it’s beautiful.
But probably the biggest reason I love it is that I can actually focus better when I’m in a space I find comfortable. Like many perfectionists and procrastinators, emotional regulation is key to my ability to get things done. When I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder, or when I can’t quite find a way to sit in my office chair without my back aching, it’s like my brain stops working. Whereas, cocooned in my favorite chair at home with a cup of tea from my personal collection, I can fall right into a flow state.
So working from home is a great option for those of us who need to dial down the anxiety in order to focus. And yet, it’s a double-edged sword. With all your favorite snacks and hobbies around – not to mention your bed! – it can be hard to consistently choose work over rest and play.
For some managers, this is exactly what they have in mind when they insist you come into the office – they want to make sure you’re staying on task!
So let’s show those managers that you can have the best of both worlds – the cozy comfort of working from home, and the focused productivity of a structured, motivating environment. Recently, Redfin asked me how people could organize their home environment to support their goals for their blog post on how to keep your New Year’s Resolutions this year, and that inspired me to go further and put together these tips for creating a productive home office space.
Remove distractions
Decide where you’ll do your work and move anything that would immediately grab your eye to a different space. In a pinch, just hiding them will still be an improvement. What we want to do is cut down on the number of times you see something and go “oh yeah, I’ve been wanting to reorganize my Magic card collection” without even realizing that you’re getting sucked into the wrong task. Look around your space and see if anything reminds you of non-work activities you’d like to do. Then just move those things to a different spot. As a bonus, that spot can help you shift back out of work time, because overworking from home is also a very real issue!
There’s also a digital version of this tip. After you remove the physical distractions in your workspace, you can make sure that any devices you use to do your work don’t put distracting apps or bookmarks in your face. They may be necessary from time to time, but they can be tucked away until you need them.
Put your work in plain sight
Just as we don’t want non-work tasks to grab your eye, we do want work tasks to grab your eye. This is where I’m going to be controversial and suggest that you allow your office space to be a little messy. Rather than having everything neatly tucked away, it can actually be helpful to have your ongoing project out where you can see it and start thinking about it without even trying. Let yourself get “distracted” by the very thing you want to pay focus on!
There’s a digital version of this tip, too. You can set your browser to open a certain page so that you’re always “distracted” by your To Do list. You can leave the file you’re working with open on your computer at the end of the day so that it’s the first thing you see when you turn your computer on – even before your email!
Remove friction
The Hidden Brain podcast episode on removing the obstacles you don’t see tells of a furniture business that became successful when it offered to take away the customer’s old sofa when delivering their new one. The friction of having to figure out how to get rid of their old sofa had been the only thing keeping excited customers from buying!
Similarly, the tiniest amount of friction can make me feel like checking my phone instead of completing a task. I can start on it as soon as I walk across the room, dig through the file cabinet, and find the right file. I know how to do that. It’s not hard. But ugh, you know? Every ugh is an opportunity to bounce off your task and into a distraction.
There are other types of friction, too. If you hate your office chair, you’ll want to avoid sitting in it and working. If you have to climb over some boxes you never finished unpacking in order to get to your desk, you won’t pop over to your desk real quick to jot down a good idea when it occurs to you.
You can get around these sources of friction by planning out your space a little more. What’s everything you need in order to do your work? What little irritations and obstacles could get in the way? See if you can get rid of some of them. It’ll never be perfect (please don’t decide that you can’t set up your home office until you renovate the renovate the whole room!) but some quick improvements can smooth your way into work.
Put out some scratch paper or a whiteboard
It’s amazing how much productivity gets lost due to overwhelm. You have multiple ideas about what you should do next, or how you should do it, and you can’t decide, so you sit there fretting. Or you get up for a snack to escape the discomfort of the storm in your mind.
But there’s another way out of that overwhelm. Do a brain dump of all the ideas for what to do next that are duking it out in your head. Get them on paper or on the whiteboard. Then you can consider them one at a time and more calmly pick one to start with.
This also works for your feelings about working. For instance, if you know what you want to work on but you really don’t feel like working on it, you could write down all the reasons why you don’t feel like it, plus the reasons why you think you should do it anyway. Once they’re written down, they don’t have to swirl around your head anymore, and you can deal with them one at a time. Some reasons to blow off work might need you to take some kind of action – maybe your blood sugar is low and you need a snack before you can think straight! Others may not be actionable, but it can feel better just to acknowledge, “you know, I really don’t feel like doing this because I find it boring. I’ll do it anyway, but it’s okay to say that I find it boring.”
The hidden benefit of this tip is that you don’t just end up writing down the thoughts that were swirling in your head – you usually end up learning new things about what you need to do and how you feel about doing it in the process of trying to write it down. So adding a place to jot down your messy thoughts is a huge addition to a productive home office.
Make it comfortable
You may think that what makes it hard to stay on task while working from home is that it’s a little too comfortable. You might associate being in “work mode” with self-denial and being kept on your toes.
But in my work, I find that the problem isn’t that people are falling asleep on the job because they’re too relaxed. It’s that they’re avoiding work because work makes them feel anxious. They don’t need to feel less comfortable, but more.
An ergonomic, comfortable office setup can lower your stress level and make it easier to sink into a focused state. Consider:
- An ergonomic setup
- Lighting bright enough that you don’t strain to see but not so bright that it gives you a headache
- Silence or the right kind of background noise
- And my favorite, an emotional support desk toy! (Nee-Doh does not pay me to say that they make the best fidget toy of all time, the Nice Cube.)
If that’s not enough to make you feel really calm and steady, then the stress might not just be at the surface level. It might be coming from deep down inside, where you can harbor fears like imposter syndrome, fear of failure, and even fear of success. The bad news is, we can’t fix that with a quick tip on the internet. But the good news is, it can change. It’s exactly what I help people with in my coaching program, Painless Productivity. Check it out if you want to find and work through the fears that are sabotaging your productivity so you can face your work with a relaxed confidence.
To your work-life balance!
I hope these tips help you make your home office both cozy and productive, so you can show your manager that you can totally handle the freedom to work from home. Just remember to unplug when your workday is over and let yourself get some good personal time in, too!