Design Your Work Day: 5 Questions for the Home Office Worker
Searching the web for suggestions on how to improve productivity in your home office, you find a lot of conflicting advice. Some writers would suggest you maintain a rigid schedule and work nowhere but a dedicated office that emulates a corporate cubicle as closely as possible. Others spend most of their time celebrating the conveniences and flexibility inherent in the situation, urging you to stay in your PJs all morning, only throwing on a pair of sweats when you're ready to hop down to the post office to enjoy the short lines of mid-morning. It's a confusing topic, made all the more so by the large fraction of workers who are new to the whole working-from-home thing, whether through recent induction into the growing ranks of telecommuters, or a shifting professional climate that encourages freelancing.
On further thought, this lack of consensus is reasonable: we're talking about millions of people, after all, working in all kinds of different capacities, with different needs, habits, and levels of self-discipline. Most advice-givers are essentially writing about what works for them, not what works for everyone...because honestly, what could?
Considering a more specific breed of worker - creative professionals - allows for more generalization. In a normal workplace, we typically like a well-designed, varied environment. We like interesting, competent co-workers, and bosses who are good at managing us (whatever that may be). We want a little bit of structure, but not too much. We like good coffee, daylight, getting out of the office for lunch.
It's remarkable how rarely any of these rules get applied to home offices though. I have seen the environments and work schedules of plenty of freelancing and telecommuting friends, and they are dreadful, almost all of them. Smart, creative people, in dark, airless rooms, staring at a screen for 12 hours a day, but only getting 5 billable hours in. This makes sense when you ponder it objectively though: if you worked in an office like that, your productivity would suffer there too.
Given the variety of personalities and working styles out there, perhaps the only piece of advice that's truly useful is to Pay Attention: to your workspace, your environment, your state of mind. Approaching the work day as a design problem to be solved is probably the most effective strategy to maximizing your productivity. So here are five questions to think about as you get started:
1. What's your perfect work space look like?
Have you ever sat down and thought about it? I'm partial to a smallish desk with plenty of storage space near by, because it keeps me from getting too cluttered, but my neighbor can't get anything done unless he's got about an acre of real estate laid out in front of him. Think about the most productive you've ever been, whether it was in the studio at school, cradling your laptop on a coffee house sofa, or sitting at a cubicle (Hey, it works for some people, don't judge) and use that as a template.
There's more to consider than just furniture, of course. As a rule of thumb, a separate dedicated work desk (or better yet, a room...for those of us who don't live in Manhattan) is better than just sprawling out on the kitchen table, but there are definitely those who are inspired by an impermanent work space. Be honest with yourself and go from there.
2. What's your lighting like?
Human brains are fantastically sensitive to photons, not just as a way of sensing the world, but also in determining our emotional state. If you're agitated and unable to concentrate, even when everything's calm and Zen-like, check your lighting. If it's possible to face a window, give that a shot, even if it's just the wall of the next building: there's a strong correlation between daylight and alertness.
That said, the preferred brightness of one's work place is a highly subjective thing, ranging from a college buddy of mine who kept a full-size fluorescent ceiling light on her work desk, to a programmer I know who likes to drape a black towel over his head and monitor so he can work in complete darkness. There's about a billion ways of lighting a space, so experiment with a few: fluorescent vs. incandescent, room vs. task lighting, overhead vs. eye-level, many sources vs. just a few. I light candles when I'm working after dark, and it helps. Stop laughing.
3. How distracted do you like to be?
The conventional wisdom says that the fewer distractions, the better, and use this as an argument in favor of telecommuting. Freed of the chattering of co-workers and the constant din of the printer/scanner/copier, goes the argument, we're finally able to actually get stuff done. Unfortunately it's not a constant for everyone, especially those of us who make part of our livelihood coming up with new ideas. We're all social animals to some extent, and sooner or later we crave a little human distraction, lest we start resembling this NY Times writer and develop a co-dependent relationship with the automated voice on our phone message system.
Getting out of the house/office is one tested way of doing this, whether it's relocating to the coffee shop for a while or going for a stroll in the park when the dog-walkers are in force. For some folks, it's as simple as having the radio on in the background, but for plenty more, our primary distraction is also our primary source of procrastination. You know the one I'm talking about:
4. How much Internet do you need?
Yes, it's indispensable, and without it you'd probably have no job, but the Internet is also the World's Greatest Timesuck, especially for the massively parallel thinkers that seem to congregate in the creative disciplines. Striking the right balance with web usage can be excruciating, because it's so hard to distinguish between what's productive and what's frivolous. The line between research and "research" is a fine one, and a creative self-deceiver will never run out of ways to justify the two hours that elapsed between "just checking the mail" and actually firing up Photoshop.
One freakishly effective tactic is to simply unplug. Literally: remove the cable from the back of the machine (those of you on Wi-fi will have to come up with some similarly powerful symbolic gesture). Of course it's not something everyone can do everyday; troubleshooting a website comes to mind as an obvious exception, or a project requiring frequent messaging chats. But there's an awful lot of work that gets done off-line, even while your Chrome window sits in the background, tantalizing you with 80 billion pages of useless crap. The simple act of unplugging the cable makes getting online a deliberate physical act, and frequently this makes the difference between spending 45 minutes a day answering emails and reading news, and letting those same tasks blossom into 5 hours of your life you'll never get back. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then bless you and your superhuman self-discipline.
5. What about the rest of your body?
We're more than just brains, eyes and clicking-fingers, after all, and keeping the rest of you healthy and happy translates into productivity more directly than you might believe. All that stuff you learned in health class about getting a good night's sleep, eating breakfast and staying physically active is embarrassingly true, and if you don't believe it you should give it a shot. Pushing your daily billables from 4 to 6 hours could be as simple as making some eggs in the morning and going for a bike ride at noon.
Like all these other questions, there are as many right answers as there are personalities and appetites. Are you a morning person who works best by waking at 5:30, running 8 miles, and consuming a Grand Slam, or does your magic combo require 4 espressos, a chandelier and old This American Life podcasts? If you don't know the answer, congratulations, you've got a great design job ahead of you.
Note: This article was originally written by Carl Alviani