Since we’re all working from home now, a good home office setup matters. Thankfully I have a room in my home which is ideal as a home office.
Get somewhere out of the way
Find somewhere that is quiet, functional and out of the way. This I would say is the most important thing about working from home. Being able to shut the door on your workspace at the end of the day is important. The picture above is a garage conversion at my previous home. It worked a treat and cost about £3,000 to do. But if you have a smaller space as I do in my current pad, so long as it fits a desk or two you can make it your own space easily!
Get a camera
Video conferencing used to be a bit of a cop out. Zoom is now part of my daily life in my home office setup. I have an external Cinema Display for my MacBook and when I was at home I plugged the MacBook into it. After being enforced into working from home I bought a Mac mini and using iCloud basically duplicated my MacBook onto that. All my MacBook files went into dropbox completing eliminating the need for any desktop files. I figured that dropbox and iCloud were more secure than an external drive at home. The cinema display has an iSight camera and gives me a lot of screen real estate to have multiple windows open.
Use IMAP
Imap is a clever thing, by making sure your email is setup using imap you can seamlessly switch from your phone to your desktop to your laptop and everything is the same. So because of Imap I can start dealign with emails on my phone while having a cup of tea in bed if I want to!
Daylite CRM
All my contacts and email history is stored in market circle’s Daylite CRM. It’s also on my iPad Pro and my iPhone Pro. Everything syncs to the Daylite cloud and so my phone, iPad, laptop and desktop are always seamlessly showing the same thing.
Comfortable chair
Having spent a long time on my cheap amazon chair I would like to encourage you to spend more than you had in mind on a chair! It might be one of the main things in your home office setup. Enough said!
Mix it up
In my top floor office I brought some of our exhibition stools and a bistro table to put at one end of the room. This means I can go and sit on them for a while. I can then also go back to my desk. If I have a call coming up that I know will be a reasonable length then I’ll plug in my ear phones and talk while I walk along the river side where I live. Keep moving or you’ll seize up!