How to create the home office of your dreams this winter
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There are many forms of WFH, with or without a traditional, remote or hybrid job. Presuming you don’t have a separate, cosy building to skip off to, the psychological separation of our work life from our leisure life takes some working out. Here’s just a sketch of things to think about.
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Nestled in its own annexe, shoehorned into a scrap of space under the stairs, or set up at one end of a kitchen counter, a comfortable, logical, ergonomic working hub will limit distractions from your wider domestic world.
After 25 years of writing in an open-plan area with no screening whatsoever, my mind neatly filters out every scream, bleat and explosive bang.
Defiant, muttering, scrappy dogs find themselves in laundry gaol, cleaning up their act. It’s taken time to reach that quiet land of productive focus. Try to find somewhere out of the heavy traffic, where you’re less likely to be physically or audibly disrupted.
Consider the passing room behind your chair — 80cm is perfect in a hall. Living alone, you can largely concentrate on isolating your thoughts. Otherwise, make a firm declaration about the sanctity of your work area, advise adult kids (or parents if you’re a student) of your study/work shifts, and ask for their compliance and support.
The less set-up you have to do to start and finish whatever task you have, the better. With all your activity on screen, this is a simple matter of slipping documents into folders. With real paperwork, together with reaching what you need without leaving the chair, it’s useful to be able to leave a file out, ready to go the next morning, undisturbed. This is why dedicated rooms available areas of spare rooms and decommissioned dining rooms work so well. Room dividers can blind off your workspace, even in part.
Using plywood or MDF panels and a few hinges, you could make and then decorate your own (a Pinterest favourite). If you use your laptop as your main computer and operate with largely paperless files, a slender or articulated perch with a single drawer and vertical wall storage can perform way beyond its square centimetres. Don’t try to solve storage issues with spontaneous buys in floor-standing storage.
Find a surface that you fit well, or invest in a solid, stable desk of 120cm-170 cm in length, at least 76cm deep, and 74cm-76cm in height depending on your stature and choice of chair. Determine what storage is vital, and the easiest way to get it to hand, without getting up. Resist the economy of a wobbling trestle or cheap flat-pack desk and dining chair that will slowly destroy your back and productivity. Home office ranges in desking and chairs can be truly shoddy. If you’re nine-five, for even a few months of the year, working remotely — go to a specialist office supplier first. Your employer may be able to help you out even in part.
Wall-hung and fold-down floating desking looks fantastic, but counter-levered without legs, quality will be key to its stability and survival. If hunching over your laptop is straining your neck, and you’re regularly working from home, consider returning to the embrace of a full desk, a floor-standing PC, a nice big monitor and a separate keyboard. Personal operator profiles and two-factor authentication can make the family PC, your PC by day.
Materials vary, but colder choices in glass desking and leather chairs can be chilly on the limbs if you’re banned to an outdoor studio, and your space heating is not up to par. “Shoffices” are shed offices that suffer from just this sort of challenge come October.
Presuming you are sitting in your chair with your legs at a 45-degree angle, feet flat on the floor, the surface of any desk should be just below your natural wrist height when you set them straight out from the forearms. Standing height is in the area of 90cm. In a standing desk, my choice would be an electrically operated sit/stand desk for ultimate versatility. If you’re less than arm’s length from your monitor, it’s too small or your desk is too skinny. Choose a flexible chair intended for regular rather than “occasional” use — your back will thank you.
Even expensive occasional seating is not engineered for 40-hour weeks. Turn on the camera of the PC and examine what’s behind you for those Zoom meetings. If you’re confined to a family den, you could use a virtual background, or just blur the room out.
Artificial light issues including blue-light protection, become more important as winter draws in. Lighting should be indirect, and that includes natural light, so think about what time of day you will use the space and its aspect. I’m a fan of generous blind corners perpendicular to a window or even a dual aspect. Facing into a wall, hugged by one wall or a bookcase, offers a calming sense of enclosure. Ambient natural light from each side can rake across the keyboard and documents, bouncing off, scattering and softening by neutral wall colours.
Computer screens all feature integral lighting which will gift you some light down to the desk surface. We also need a dedicated lamp for tasking (finding your keyboard, charger, phone and perusing traditional paperwork after dusk).
Try to layer and balance task and general lighting to a gentle, natural northerly effect — shadow-less with little contrast. The lumens of desk lamps can be overpowering and are often chosen to posture on the desk rather than to use.
Investigate a model you can angle to cloud light back off the desk or a strip model that clips to the top edge of a larger monitor. If you’ve chosen an overhead feature pendant to anchor a nook, reduce the lumens and bounce that softer light off the table.
If you are right-handed, don’t position a light behind your right arm, creating shadows. Strong lighting behind you, will again, create shadow and contrast. Pointing a desk out a window looks tres-chic in a glossy magazine with pastoral and exciting city views.
In reality, even without the mesmerising distractions outside, the disparity between the dazzling screen of a laptop or PC, and the light streaming in from outside, spells exhausting eye strain in all but a fully north-facing room.
The exquisite control of semi-opaque, day/night, doubles or Venetian blinds will be essential if you’re still determined. Try backing the desk up even 60cm, to allow the window light a more diminished intensity.
Tuning things on your PC, together with display brightness, there is usually a night mode to reduce short-wavelength, visible blue light which can lead to digital strain and reduced productivity.
You can also add a blue light-reducing app and/or protective, physical screen. Trust me, it makes all the difference to getting a longer project done and dusted.