One of the perks of working from home is the flexibility that the arrangement provides. Theoretically speaking, you’re capable of working from anywhere that you have internet access. With coffee shops offering free wifi, and many unlimited data plans for phones allowing for tethering on the go, the possibilities are endless.
While this sounds grand to most people, the reality is that most of us in remote working gigs won’t be spending all of our time working in exotic locales and bustling coffee shops – most of us will be working from our homes the majority of the time.
Considering all of that flexibility though, is it important that you have a home office? I would argue yes, and here’s why.
Quick note: Not everyone that works from home may have the means or ability to dedicate an extra room in their house to a home office – that’s totally fine and understandable! If you’re in that boat, consider a consistent and dedicated working space instead, and the rest should remain just as applicable to you.
Table of Contents
- The work mentality and mindset
- Closing the door after work
- Avoiding the hustle and bustle of home
- Don’t mix business and leisure
- What if I don’t have room for a dedicated workspace?
The work mentality and mindset
Having a dedicated space to work in is important because it signals to you a pretty simple concept: you’re here to work.
If you were working in a traditional office, stepping through the doors of the building helps to essentially flip your brain from regular mode to work mode. You know you’re here to do business, and you know that you’re going to be operating under a slightly different mindset and mentality than you were before you left the house.
Your remote workspace is no different.
If you’ve set up a makeshift office beside your bed, those comfy blankets and fluffy pillows are going to be in your peripheral vision all day, and with that comes a totally different mindset. Having a rough day? Your bed is just a few feet away, it wouldn’t take much to hop in just for a quick nap to recharge your batteries.
But would that fly in most traditional workspaces? Probably not.
Considering the amount of self-restraint and personal accountability needed to work from home, it’s important that you do what you can to eliminate simple variables like this. Setting yourself up for success with easy wins like a dedicated working space can pull a ton of weight when it comes to making you successful at working from home.
With all of that being said, putting yourself into the proper mindset for work isn’t the only perk of a dedicated working space – the opposite is true too.
Closing the door after work
Just as there’s usually a transition into the working headspace, traditional work setups offer a pretty clear transition out of it too: you gather your belongings, say goodbye to your coworkers, and then hop in your car to drive home. This is a clear signal that your workday is over.
Working from home doesn’t quite have that same signal to your brain. In fact, if you don’t have a dedicated working space and instead work wherever the opportunity presents itself, your workspace and your home space are one and the same.
By creating a dedicated place to work while you’re at home, you give yourself the ability to have a door to shut, or a space to leave when your day is finished. That leaving or closing the door is a signal to your brain that says, “Hey, we’re done here, time to transition to home mode.”
When you don’t have this clear sort of message to yourself, it’s incredibly easy to fall into the common pitfall of overworking. In fact, this is one of the biggest downsides of working from home.
If you tend to work from your couch, and your laptop is right beside you, what’s stopping you from hopping back into the job to handle something you just got an email about? It’s right there, you might as well just take care of it really quick…
Before you know it, work time has encroached on home time, and you’ll find yourself sliding down a slippery slope that rapidly eats away at home time.
Work-life balance is incredibly important, and maintaining a healthy balance helps to ease stress and burnout.
If you’ve established a clear place to work at home though, that email that pops up is something that’s more easily ignored and regarded as something that can be handled the next time you’re in your workspace. Not only is this better for your family, social life, and mental health, but it’s better for your career too since you’re proactively taking a common element of burnout out of the equation.
Avoiding the hustle and bustle of home
Let’s face it: homes, especially with families or roommates, can be distracting.
If you’re attempting to get some serious work done while your roommate or significant other is watching TV on the couch next to you, chances are you’re not going to be working as effectively as you would be if that wasn’t the case.
If you’re trying to get work done at the kitchen table while your kids are picking away at lunch, chances are you’re not going to be working as effectively as you would be if that wasn’t the case.
There are numerous examples like this that crop up around the house that we don’t even think about or consider. Is it possible to work under these conditions? Sure, especially if you’ve got the self-restraint to ignore these distractions, or you’re incredibly focused. But do those things apply to most of us? Certainly not.
Putting aside potential interruptions to work, there’s also the fact that temptation is everywhere else in your house. Your kitchen is right there to throw together a nice meal for lunch, or get a head start on dinner. Your living room TV could have the next episode of the show you’re watching on Netflix ready to go in a few seconds. Cleaning up some clutter could sound more appealing than work, and save you from needing to do it later.
If you don’t make an attempt to wall yourself off from these things, you’re going to start noticing them at some point during your work day.
Creating a space in the home that’s specifically designed for getting work done helps you to immerse yourself in your work, and to create an environment that’s freer from distractions than it otherwise would be.
Don’t mix business and leisure
Have you ever had a phase in the traditional workspace where you just absolutely loathed being there? The drive to it was awful. Walking through the doors was awful. Getting to where you’re working was awful. The space itself? Awful.
Many of us have been there and built these negative associations with our places of work in the past. It’s human. Sure, they’re often phases that fade over time, but they’re no less real and unpleasant to deal with when they happen.
Now picture that scenario happening, but with your living room, bedroom, or kitchen.
You’ve had a long day at work, nothing seems to be going well, and now your place of relaxation is carrying that same energy of that long day that you’ve just spent in it. It’s going to be a lot harder to relax, fall asleep, or simply enjoy your time in that room because of the established association. In fact, it may be made even worse due to the feeling that you’re spending all of your waking day there.
Feeling like you spend so much time in your house is already another one of the bigger downsides of working from home, but actively associating a place of relaxation and good things with the negative aspects of work takes that feeling and dials it up a few notches.
If you create a dedicated workspace at home though, you save yourself from these kinds of things. Sure, you may end up going through similar phases with your office, but that’s a whole lot better than another area of your house that’s meant to help create a sense of relaxation and relief.
What if I don’t have room for a dedicated workspace?
Not everyone has the room in their house for a dedicated workspace, especially if you’re just getting started on working from home. I’ve been working from home for close to a decade, and when I started, I set up a desk beside my bed that would operate as home base.
It was not an ideal arrangement.
To try and combat some of the issues mentioned thus far, I ended up falling into somewhat of a routine: I’d wake up in the morning, gather my work things and computer, and then set them up on the dining room table. The space where I set up my computer wasn’t where I ate dinner each night; that was my working seat. When work was finished, I’d pack up all of my things and return them to my bedroom.
Why did this help?
- It was part of a routine. Routines, like getting dressed for work in the morning, are important.
- The act of moving my work things to my bedroom and putting them away was as close to closing the door on work as I could get at that time. That signaled to me work was over.
- It sounds a little silly, but having a separate seat at the table to work from helps establish that as the work seat instead of the place I sit to eat dinner.
If the dining room table isn’t exactly your first choice of places to work, maybe take a look around your house to see if a space could be repurposed.
Is there a section of your basement or attic you could spruce up into a makeshift working space? Maybe a mud room or foyer of some sort?
If you do end up having to use your bedroom, which in my opinion is one of the hardest places to work from, I’d highly recommend looking into investing in some curtains, or even standing privacy wall panels to section off a specific piece of the bedroom that’ll be used for work. It may not be an office, but it’ll be a place you can consistently work from and shut off when the day is over.
It’s a bit ironic that part of ditching the office includes making a new one, but if you go through with creating a dedicated working space, your future self will certainly thank you.
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