One of the main advantages of freelancing is the ability to equip and decorate your workplace according to personal preferences, without sacrificing the efficiency of the production process. In other words, the home office design should never mix work and personal areas.
Regardless of whether you enjoy freelancing or not, your productivity and mood will directly depend on how competently you have equipped your home office . After all, a desk littered with papers and poorly functioning office equipment will bring disorganization to work, blocking the creative potential vital to a freelancer.
If you feel that your home workplace is not comfortable enough, following the following tips will help you organize it and greatly increase your productivity.
- Do not mix work with personal life
The most common mistake that lies in wait for novice freelancers is trying to combine work with entertainment. Even if you try hard to separate them, it is not always possible to achieve this at the initial stage of activity.
How to deal with the problem:
- Periodically look for distractions near your workplace. Put TVs, game consoles and other things away from your eyes that can tempt you and distract you from the work process.
- Clearly define the boundaries of your work space, inside which you do business, and outside of which you rest and have fun. This approach allows you to quickly create the necessary psychological attitude for productive work.
- Take care of a comfortable chair
Are you comfortable working in a chair set up in your home office? What kind of productive mental work can you do when you are constantly forced to squirm in your chair, trying to find a comfortable position for your back?
Experts claim that more than 90% of the adult population of civilized countries periodically experience back pain caused by uncomfortable office furniture. If you do not pay attention to this problem for a long time, you can soon become a permanent patient of a vertebrologist.
How to deal with the problem:
- Carefully choose a chair for your home office . It should allow you to precisely adapt to your physical parameters, and also be made of safe materials. It is clear that such a chair by definition cannot be cheap.
- Do not skimp on lighting
Most often, we simply neglect the issues of lighting our workplace. Does our table lamp give off much or little light? And how are things going with natural lighting? How far is our desktop from the windows?
After all, it has long been no secret that people’s mental activity decreases in winter due to the lack of sunlight. On the contrary, in spring and summer, our mood improves, and it takes less time to sleep. Therefore, in cloudy weather or when working at night, you should seriously take care of the sufficient lighting of your home office.
How to deal with the problem:
- Experiment with lamps of different intensity of light and color tone to understand which ones suit you best. Depending on the arrangement of your workplace, choose the lamps that will most fully meet your needs.
- Electrician sacramento recommends to use a multi-bulb lamp with the ability to precisely adjust the lighting of different areas of the workplace .
- Monitor the technical condition of your office equipment
If you are going to work at home most of the time, then modern technologies will become your reliable partner. Constant problems in the computer and peripheral devices, a poor connection between them can cause real disappointment in work.
Perhaps you are using morally outdated equipment, as you want to save on the purchase of more advanced models. However, in return, you pay in time spent troubleshooting and nerve cells wasted worrying about burning deadlines.
How to deal with the problem:
- Update yourself . In addition to regular software updates, do not forget to perform a preventive inspection and cleaning of the equipment installed in the home office.
- Be safe . Make regular backups of data, the loss of which could be fatal for you.
- Upgrade your hardware
Another aspect of technical support for your home office is the purchase of hardware and software products that provide more advanced functions. After working for some time on your own, you will be able to decide on technical innovations, the purchase of which will allow you to significantly increase your productivity.
How to deal with the problem:
- Stop putting off solving the problem until later. Write a list of features that will allow you to significantly increase your work efficiency. For example, if you are engaged in design, then purchasing a more advanced and larger monitor will allow you to better cope with the tasks at hand.
- If possible, optimize the process
If the work has become so exhausting that there is no more strength to continue it, you should try to streamline the production process . After all, the successful career of a freelancer depends not on the time spent at work, but on its effectiveness.
The most frequent reasons for a decrease in the efficiency of activities are problems with finding the materials and documents you need.
How to deal with the problem:
- Maintain order in the workplace. If you’re trying to get more done, you’re probably constantly putting off tidying up your workplace, which will eventually become an obstacle to your efficiency. Moreover, this applies not only to the office desk, but also to electronic documents located in the computer.
- Sort and organize documents. Keep only the materials you are currently working with on your desktop.
In any case, experiment and find those solutions, the use of which will allow you to significantly increase your own productivity.
