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your business from your house combines your work and the rest of your life.
With both of these life aspects located in one space, you will need to
develop a new set of disciplines. Priorities from each aspect of your life
will be competing for your attention. There will be days when you feel that
answering emails needs to be tackled first before laundry. But there will be
days when you will feel that your first important job for the day will be
your laundry!
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To help you concentrate with work in your home office and ensure
productivity, consider the following specifics when you are setting up your
home office and choosing a site for your home office in your house.
1. Establish your home office in a part of the
house that has lots of light and air. Think about the year-round
conditions in this spot, not just what it's like during the season that you
are setting up your home office. In buying lighting, match the type to task.
Ambient lighting, which lights up the room, should be uniform and moderately
bright. You may also want to have overhead lighting and floor lamps. Also
keep the room from getting stuffy by providing the proper ventilation to
room. Choose a space with windows that you can open to keep air circulating.
2. Set-up shop away from the busy areas in your
home. Make sure your home office is as far as possible from
potential distractions such as the kitchen, front door, family traffic and a
lot of noise. This is especially important if you have children and will
have child care in the house during the day. If you can see or hear your
children and they can see you, it will be difficult for both you and your
kids.
3. Organize your supplies. Similar to
a corporate environment, you need to arrange your supplies in a way that
promotes efficiency. You need not lift two stacks of bond paper just to get
to your business stationery located at the furthermost end of your cabinet.
Hide supplies that you do not need everyday such as extra rolls of tape and
piles of bond paper; but keep within reach a small cache of supplies at your
desk or near enough that you can reach them. Stack extra supplies under your
desk, out of kicking range. If space permits, keep extra supplies in a
cabinet or cupboard. If it makes you more comfortable and efficient,
consider hanging the phone on the wall near your desk to help free some desk
space.
4. Set up things so they function smoothly.
Maximize the layout of your home office space with the goal of promoting
efficiency of operations foremost in the design. Arrange your things to help
you function better. For example, remove stacks of paper in front of your
fax machine that could potentially block and jam incoming documents. Manage
your workflow creatively.
5. Limit the things in your home office to items
that you need for your business. Clear out all of the old clutter
in your home office area. If you set-up your home office in your attic, make
sure that you have enough room for all your requirements. It is difficult to
work in a place filled with stuffs irrelevant to your business. However, if
you cannot remove these things from the room, make sure that you move them
out of your vision. Create visual and psychological separation by enclosing
the area with a screen or a decorative barrier could be a way to address
this problem. Tidiness of the office environment can help improve your
productivity.
6. A home office does not need to be a separate
room. If space is an issue, you can simply set-up a table and a
chair in one corner of a room. You can also use the space underneath the
stairways, the space at the end of hallways, or the loft space and landing
between floors. Some even work in a nook off the kitchen. The important
thing is that you can have a permanent workspace that is dedicated to your
work. The disadvantage of this set-up, however, is the potential for
distraction.
7. Have a dedicated work area.
The
ideal situation is to have a permanent room for your work area, both from a
productivity and taxation point of view. A distinct workspace helps
condition your mind that this is a place where you do work. Moreover, having
a separate area that is used exclusively and regularly for your business is
an important criterion to qualify for tax deductions for your home office.
If you are prepared to do some renovations, you can consider converting your
attic, basement, deck off the living room or kitchen, carport or garage into
your very own home office.
About the Author:
Jenny Fulbright
is a staff writer of Power Homebiz Guides.
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