I usually get asked about my home-offices. Apparently, people seem to like them and ask for tips on how to create their own. In order to address this, I wrote a huge article about office design back in October 2011 using the story to build my workplace when I was working from home at IBM.
Since then, a lot has changed. Technology evolved a lot in the past 3 years and today my home-office is completely different. So, I thought that an update for that article is adequate. What I am going to show here is valid not only for home-offices, but for traditional offices as well.
Environment
Our working environment is the key for a great workplace. It doesn’t matter if it is in your home, at your company offices, or at Starbucks. You have to feel comfortable in order to be productive and happy. This varies from person to person, but there are some points that most will agree on as the main ideas behind a great workplace.
Light and space
Enough daylight and physical space are prerequisites for a good office. The idea here is to create a place where you don’t feel claustrophobic.
The space problem is simple: the room must have enough space to allow you to do your work. If you are constantly bumping into things while working, it is a sign that you need a larger room. And it is very important that the room has a window.
Daylight creates a better mood than artificial light, especially when compared against white light bulbs. So having windows is a must. You can always use blinders to control the natural lighting and use artificial light to complement sunlight in a cloudy day.
Pay close attention to your monitors. The background of them should always be brighter than the screen. This reduces eyestrain. I always keep a LED lamp lighting the wall behind my monitor for that purpose.
Noise
Like I said in my working from home article, the absence of noise is essential to get things done. I personally hate open-floor plans because they allow too much interruptions and distractions.
Tom DeMarco discusses the importance of private offices in his Peopleware book — as he puts it, “Bring Back the Door”. When designing your office, think about a private room where you can close the door and concentrate on what you need to do. This is especially important if you are creating a home-office and have a family. The door is the physical barrier between your family and your work hours.
You may also want to add carpet on the floor to cut the noise even more.
Furniture
Get a desk with enough space to work. Straight desks usually work better than L-shaped because the “L” corner usually end up as dead space. Pay attention to the size of your monitor — the larger it is, the wider the desk to achieve proper viewing distance. For a 27″, 47″ (1.20m) is the minimum width for the desk.
A good office chair is mandatory. You are going to spend around 8 hours a day seated, so it doesn’t make sense to save money here. It should have at least two adjustments: height and armrest height. Textile mesh finishes usually work better than leather, because they provide more ventilation. Good examples of proper office chairs are Herman Miller’s Aeron, Embody and Mirra chairs.
Besides the basics, you may also get a bookshelf or any other piece of furniture you need to work. Just don’t clog your office space with furniture. Keep it nice and simple.
The total cost of acquisition for furniture is high, but this is diluted in the long run.
Technology
A simple rule is to buy the best tools money can buy. In order to achieve that, you may reduce your spending on items you don’t actually need to get your work done (i.e. do you really need a tablet, or a smartphone + laptop combination suffices?).
Another way to save money is to keep yourself locked in a single ecosystem. Avoid moving from Google to Microsoft to Apple. Choose the one that is more adequate for you and stick with it. Re-purchasing apps and media when you move between ecosystem can set you back by a few hundred dollars at best. This will also save you time restoring data when you upgrade devices.
If you buy the best tools, chances are the tech stuff won’t get in your way (maintenance, setup, etc). This is important, because the wrong tech will steal productivity time from you.
The very basic you should aim for today is:
- Workstation: device where you do your work without constraints and software for it. This will vary from one profession to another. For me, this is a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro
connected to a 27″ Apple Thunderbolt Display.
- Mobility: framework to allow you to work from anywhere. This includes at least a smartphone or a mobile (3G/LTE) WiFi hotspot, email, messaging and some cloud solution. I use an iPhone 5S
and a second device that can be either my MacBook Pro or my iPad Air. Never both. My email of choice is GMail and I use iMessages, Google Hangouts and Telegram for messaging. For cloud, I rely mostly on and Google Drive (for Google Docs).
- Productivity control: software that allow you to track your goals, tasks and accomplishments. I am an OmniFocus fan for GTD and Evernote for note taking and mind maps.
- Security and backups: the bare minimum is a password manager (to avoid reuse of passwords) and local backups. Ideally, you should go for both onsite and offsite backups and use full disk encryption for all your storage. I recommend 1Password for managing passwords, a network-based solution for local backups (i.e. Apple Time Capsule
or any NAS) and CrashPlan for remote backups. If you still don’t believe in the importance of backups, please read my blog post about backups.
Add complementary items as needed — laser printer, other software, etc. Whatever you need to get your work done. But keep it simple and leave distractions aside.
Conclusions
When it comes to designing the perfect workplace, simplicity stands out. Get only what you need, get the clutter out of the way and keep the environment comfortable.
One guy who really gets all of this is Joel Spolsky, CEO of FogCreek. His 2008 article about their office is still one of my references to this day. If you want to take a virtual tour in his office, click here.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.