Providing Yourself with a Positive Remote Workspace

Providing Yourself with a Positive Remote Workspace

Working from home (WFH) has been touted as an incredible perk for years now — and with the right setup, it can be. However, if you simply open up your laptop and plunk down at the kitchen table day after day; chances are you won’t enjoy the WFH experience for long. Providing yourself with a positive remote workspace is essential.

With the coronavirus sending millions of employees home to a variety of remote work scenarios. Take some time to ensure that your particular homefront is set up for positivity, productivity, and overall success. Here are a few suggestions to make sure that this is the case.

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Dedicate That Space

If you want to have a good work from home experience, you have to find a space that can be specifically dedicated to working. This isn’t just a recommendation, it’s remote work 101. If you work from bed or on the couch. You’re going to quickly discover that it makes it difficult to focus while you’re working and unplug when you’re not.

Utilizing an area for two distinctly different activities can muddle the purpose of the space in your mind. This can make it hard to truly relax when you sit down on the couch, or it can lead to falling asleep while you work from bed.

Instead, start by finding a space in your home that you can devote to working. Even if you live in a small house or a tiny apartment. Your home workspace can be a full-blown office, a cleared-out closet, or even a corner of a common room. While the latter suggestions aren’t ideal, they can still help you avoid overlapping your personal and professional lives.

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Consider Your Environment

It’s important to prioritize function as you initially dedicate a space and set it up for your work needs. If you want a positive remote work experience; at a certain point you have to consider the look and feel of your home office as well.

This is the fun part. Once you have your space and your equipment set up, look for ways to introduce a sense of productivity, positivity, and good vibes, such as:

• Making sure you have good lighting (natural and artificial) flooding your workspace.
• Purchasing an ergonomic chair and desk.
• Including some greenery to provide a fresh, outdoor feel.
• Establishing a coffee bar — ideally in the space, but in the kitchen works, too.

The goal shouldn’t be to overload space or create unnecessary distractions. On the contrary, many of the above suggestions are quite simplistic and minimalistic. However, you want to look for subtle-yet-effective ways that you can boost the mood of your work environment. To make it a more desirable space to spend hours of your time every day.

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Tend to Your Work-Life Balance

The ability to maintain work-life balance is essential. If you want to stay positive and productive in your remote work efforts. While this can be impacted by your actual work environment, it can also be dependent on other factors, like:

• Establishing boundaries to avoid interruptions from family members when you’re working.
• Also establishing boundaries, such as turning off notifications, that allow you to unplug from work when you’re finished each day.
• Being able to have genuine privacy and peace and quiet as you work.
• Keeping a schedule and staying organized.
• Maintaining a morning routine to start each day.
• Getting dressed before you start work.
• Starting and ending each day with some downtime via a “virtual commute.”

By striving to maintain proper work-life balance. You’ll enable yourself to genuinely enjoy each day, whether you’re working, sleeping, tending to personal responsibilities, or just relaxing.

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Take Breaks and Unplug Often

Finally, taking breaks is a critical aspect of long-term remote work success. If you want to stay productive over longer periods of time throughout the day, you must allow yourself to take breaks from time to time. 

This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to completely stop working — although giving your mind a rest by going for a walk or getting a cup of coffee is a great idea. Even if you find that you don’t want to stop working, you should at least regularly shift between tasks.

It’s recommended that you avoid working on the same task for more than two hours at a time. Once you’ve passed that two-hour mark, look for something else to do.

In addition to taking breaks, it’s also wise to plan in regular time to completely unplug from your electronic devices. Remote work is infamous for trapping employees into feeling like they never stop working, so deliberately cutting yourself off from notifications and work responsibilities at times is wise. Instead, look for a hobby that you can focus on, read a book, or even sign up for an offbeat subscription box to give you something else that you can focus on in your device-free moments.

Staying Positive While Working Remotely

The ability to stay positive and productive as a remote worker is dependent on multiple factors. Your work environment, work-life balance, and ability to take breaks and unplug can all factor into how well you do (or do not) have a positive experience.

So consider the above suggestions, take a look at your current circumstances, and try to make tweaks and adjustments to your WFH situation to create the most positive results possible.