When working from home, you’re all alone and there’s a need to focus on getting your projects completed. For most of our readers, they’re involved in technology in some way whether that’s coding up a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), building up their security skills on the side to eventually become a service provider or offering various IT services to clients.
Here are some thoughts on what gear makes sense when working from home.
Are You Sitting or Standing Comfortably?
Whether you believe in the current trend towards using a standing desk over sitting down all day (the research goes either way on this topic, as is often the case!), you still need a Working from Home. After all, you are going to be productive for a good few hours every day.
You also have far more control over what type of chair or desk that you’ll be using compared to your salaried worker days where the company just provided what they wanted. If you had a wobbly castor wheel on your office chair, tough luck unless you could sneakily swap it out for a colleague’s or wrangle someone to fix it for you.
Figure out what type of desk and chair suits you and still fits into your budget. If you aren’t going to have client visits (or you can rent a meeting room to take them there), then you could even get a second-hand desk and chair to keep costs down.
Do You Need an Audio Soundtrack to Focus Better?
The advantage of having a home office is that you can use a Bluetooth speaker for a better-quality sound rather than earbuds in the office. Any of these speakers provide greater quality sound and avoids you getting hot or sweaty ears from wearing earbuds or a headset too long in one sitting.
Bluetooth speakers provide quality treble and base, along with a deeper sound. Many Bluetooth speakers are now waterproof too. Most of the better ones are larger and heavier, as it’s difficult to produce mini speakers with an authentic sound.
Once you have your speaker setup ready, then you should find a good streaming service or grab some YouTube videos to get vocal-free audio that won’t disturb you. It provides a background to your workday without interrupting thought processes at the same time.
Less is More?
The feeling of a cluttered work area doesn’t create mental clarity. Having a clear desk policy is only the beginning though. You’ll want to take the approach that less is more with your home office. Avoid doing the geek thing by having clutter everywhere the eye can see, possibly with the exception of prized collectibles.
Look for gear that performs more than one purpose to stay compact. If office essentials are necessary – like a hole punch and a set of lever arch files – put them away out of sight because they’ll only be used occasionally.
Essential Tech vs ‘Would Be Nice to Have’ Tech
As geeks, we tend to collect tech gear as we go. We’re also loathe to sell it, give it away or stop using it unless we’re upgrading to something bigger and better.
While this may be true in our personal lives or past life (before a home office), that approach doesn’t work particularly well when working for yourself. It’s also hard to keep up with – like non-geeky fashionable garb – when getting a bit older and budgets get tighter due to other commitments, such as kids or saving for the future. No, Han Solo never had to worry about that kind of thing, but we live in the real world here…
If you’re budget conscious, pick a laptop that meets your needs. Not one to brag about to your friends. This means, if you’re only doing low-end graphical work or basic web coding for a web design business, then you don’t need a gamer rig unless you’re playing games five hours a night. And let’s face it, gaming that much is incompatible with running a home-based business anyway, which you may have discovered already.
While you might not want to be seen dead with a Chromebook, a laptop with a Linux distro installed on it will perform just as well (the Android apps running on Chrome OS are unreliable right now).
Late Night Sessions? Use a Blue Light Filter App
Blue light filter apps are not just for your mobile device. They’re always available for a Windows PC, Apple Mac or directly inside a Chrome web browser too. The idea with blue light apps is that natural daylight contains blue light, which makes it harder to focus and sleep later on.
When working later in the evening on a project, use an app for your laptop or desktop that removes the blue light to make it easier on your eyes. This won’t be ideal for graphics design and video editors – remember to disable the blue light filter when editing or designing – but otherwise it can be automatically set to activate at a certain time of day.
F.lux is probably the most well-known app of this type. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, plus there are also free versions for both iOS and Android too. Iris Mini is another free app that’s worth a try. It accesses the system tray in Windows and is discrete. It uses the local time-zone to correctly tell when to start reducing the blue light that comes through your desktop/laptop screen. Your eyes will thank you.
When working from home, it’s like entering a new world. While you may have believed previously that working in an office was too distracting, silence is its own challenge. It’s easy to get distracted with a YouTube video or get involved with ‘busy work’ and lose a whole afternoon of productivity. For this reason, it’s sometimes useful to block certain websites at particular times of the day. While this might not be practical all the time – YouTube is a useful research tool too – it’s necessary if you get easily distracted. Try it if you feel you need to.
