As I work from home more and more, I’ve given a lot of thought to the requirements for my idea home office. To get a sense of what I want in a home office, it probably helps to know what my current home office is like.

My present home office resides on the top floor in a spare bedroom painted a light pink because we were too lazy to repaint it when we first moved in. My glass-topped, L-shaped desk sits in a corner. My personal laptop faces the window in the room, looking eastward. My work laptop faces a wall, facing southward. On the corner between the two computers is a scanner. To the right the desk is a small table with a printer. Under the table is a table of roughly 100,000 cables of various types. Above my desk on the south wall are two shelves that contain frequently used books: my journals/commonplace books, Field Notes notebooks, Fowlers and Mirriam-Websters, a World Almanac, and The Elements of Style.

I can work pretty well in this environment, but I often daydream about what my ideal home office would be like. Considering my experience so far, here are my requirements for an ideal home office:

• Separate desks for computer work, and non-computer work. While I spend a lot of time working on a computer, I also spent a good deal of time doing work off the computer. If I am on a call, for instance, I might have a web meeting open on my computer, and my work notebook (paper) open in front of my to take notes, or to review items that I want to discuss in the meeting. There’s no good place to set the notebook. The desk isn’t big enough. Ideally, I’d have a separate desk with a large flat surface for non-computer work.
• More bookshelves. Most of my books are on shelves in our living room. Ideally, these books would be on shelves in my home office, surrounding me as I work.
• Ideally, my home office would be isolated from the rest of the house, perhaps in a barn converted into an office. E. B. White did a lot of his writing in a barn; I don’t see why I couldn’t work in one as well.
• A place away from my desk where I can sit and read. If this was in my imagined barn, it would be nice of this place were near a fireplace or stove for keeping warm during the winter.

One thing I do not need in my home office is a sit/stand desk. We have these desks in the “hoteling” spaces in my work office. When I go into the office I can check out one of these offices, and I’ve used the sit/stand desk. Though I have tried to stand while working, I am more comfortable when sitting, and I think comfort is a big part of productivity.

My home office suits me pretty well as it stands, but every now and then, I like to daydream.