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With more people working from home, home offices are now the in-thing. Setting up your home office is not just about the office furniture. It’s about optimizing your environment to enhance productivity and to promote good health.

If you have an empty room, choosing a home office space may be easy. If you don’t, you have to be more creative. What do you need to consider before creating the spot for your home office?

1.Distraction-Free

You want to choose a spot that is free from distractions as much as possible. Imagine your brother interrupting your Zoom call because that is the time he has chosen to listen to Wizkid via Bluetooth-enabled speakers, at the highest volume. Imagine the frustration? Exactly.

Frequent distractions from pets, the TV, or your family members will greatly reduce your productivity.

Still, on distractions, the biggest source of distractions for many people is their mobile phones. You want to dedicate a separate desk for your personal devices, separate from your office desk.

2. Consider Lighting

While choosing a home office spot, you need a place that has enough natural light. Lighting from a natural source will improve your efficiency and alertness. You should only use light from lamps as an extra source. Reading and working in natural light improves the eyes.

If your office furniture can back or face a window, even better. It is only a bad idea to sit close to a window if distractions are lurking behind the frame.

Meanwhile, your screen brightness should not be too bright or too low and you shouldn’t have a hand lamp too close to your computer.

3. Good Internet Service

This is a no-brainer. Many folks miss working from the office because they become their own internet service provider. You are now the IT guy you used to berate for slow internet.

Now that you are your own internet guy, you should conduct a query for the best service provider based on

• The fastest connectivity in your area. A good place to start is asking other people working from home in your area.
• A good customer service-response team. You don’t want to be stuck with a voicemail when your service goes bad or you have queries.
• Cheap data plan. Getting a good ISP doesn’t mean you should burn all your funds on just data. The trick is to compare prices and choose the affordable one that meets the first two criteria.

4. Free Up Space

It is easy to start littering your office furniture with non-work materials because you’re working from home. The stray remote, the unfinished book, or even worse, used plates.

You want to make your office desk as free from non-essentials as possible. It helps you create the right environment to do good work.

5. Use a Standing Desk

If you can, you definitely should get a standing desk.  According to research, a standing desk forces you to stay alert. Think about it. You are more likely to mistakenly spend 30 minutes on Twitter while sitting in front of your laptop than while standing.

Apart from getting your focus levels high, using a standing desk has immense health benefits. Sitting for too long, as is usually the case in traditional office settings, can cause obesity, and cardio-vascular diseases.

A good way to implement the standing desk method is to do it in intervals. Alternate between sitting and standing to work to optimize your effectiveness at work.

6. Final Thoughts

Do what works.

Now that you have your own home office, wouldn’t you rather do something different? After iterating for the first few days/weeks, reassess how your current setup works for you. Keep improving based on your evaluation. Go for it!