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.
RSS - Posts
I came across a post on Kottke.org yesterday. I thought about you as soon as I saw the title: A Writing Shed of One’s Own. 😁
Nice! Have you ever seen Chuck Wendig’s writing shed?
I haven’t actually. I associate writing sheds with very cold winters and discomfort for some odd reason, so I haven’t really taken an interest in them. 😜
I also like how he needs 6 sharp pencils to get started each day. Someone once interviewed Isaac Asimov about what he needed to do when he sat down to write. He was unclear of what the questioner meant. Did he have any rituals he went through? “Oh, yes, I see,” said Asimov, “when I sit down to write, the first thing I do, the very first thing, is to put a piece of paper into the typewriter.”
I like that. Nothing fancy, just be ready to do the work.