With the current global situation, people working from home has increased massively. Suddenly, it's reality for many companies to send their employees to work from home. Even my dad who usually works off-shore, is proud of the little home-setup he built. Some people have barely or never worked from home, and some people are pretty used to it as they work from home frequently or by default. I fall into the category "by default working from home" and occasionally going to the office. Therefore I'm not hardly impacted by the sudden # WFH, but I do see my friends, family, and business relations optimizing their home office environments and I'm happy to share my home setup and tips.
What works best for me to stay focused, is a clean desk, natural daylight and music in the background.
My current setup is as follows:
Bamboo seating & standing desk from Muuv
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3
Microsoft Bluetooth mouse peach / Microsoft Surface Arc Mouse (alternating)
Microsoft Surface Headphones
Microsoft Surface Docking Station
Dell Ultra Sharp 38" Monitor – U3818DW
LaMetric Time smart clock
Rug and storage space from IKEA
How to survive home office together
I share my home office together with my boyfriend, however we usually have pretty busy (travel) schedules with community and conference engagements. Now that most of the conferences have been cancelled in the upcoming weeks, and we are advised by the government to work from home as much as possible, we are "stuck" together in the home office and I love my noise cancelling Surface Headphones more than ever before 😉Hehe, just kidding. However, when one of us is having a call we give each other space and privacy and one of us then moves away to the kitchen table:
When I need to take a Teams call, I move to the kitchen table instead
My 5 Tips when you're working from home
1. get up, stand up
If you can, I highly recommend to get a standing desk. It's so nice to stand up once in a while and it's of course better for your body too instead of sitting down all day. The one I have is from Muuv, and I heard the standing desks from IKEA are amazing too.
2. Rest your feet
Sometimes I really like to put my feet up while sitting in my office chair, and then this little cushion thingy is really convenient to rest my feet on:
3. Get out of the house and move
It's convenient, you are at the comfort of your own home and if you did your shopping right, you have everything you need at home. However, it's really good for your health and productivity to "ventilate" outside, get some fresh air and movement. Now that gyms are being shut down, I like to go for a bike ride around the village and sniff the fresh air of Spring coming closer.
It's also important that you ventilate at home, open your windows every day to get fresh air into your home office
4. Take a (coffee) break, eat healthy and don't spill on your keyboard
I'm one of those coffee addicts, however I restrict myself to 2 coffees per day (latte macchiato) without sugar and try to drink enough water (I fail at that) and eat a piece of fruit everyday.
I quit drinking coffee WITH sugar years ago, after I once spilled it over my keyboard and most letters just got stuck and sticky
5. Stay organized, use labels (you will love this!)
Do you recognize that you're looking for something (let it be an envelope, a cable, a ruler or anything else) and you're opening 15 drawers until you finally find it? Make that history by one time taking the time to use labels on drawers, boxes etc. to not waste any time on looking for stuff anymore.
DYMOS are a girl's best friend
This is the label maker I use from the brand DYMO, which you can find at many (office) stores online:
Lastly, it goes without saying that Microsoft Teams is the way to go - we use it daily in our company for file sharing, calls, live streams, group discussions, polls, customer communication, and so on. I'm happy to see many companies are shifting to Microsoft Teams right now as more employees (start) working from home or remote. This way, it's easier for all of us to stay connected and most important of all: productive while #WFH.
Thank you for reading my blog and I hope you found (some of) my tips useful.
That is a lovely super clean setup, very impressive.
What are the red and black speakers on the shelf behind your desk?