This is a great thing when you want to work from home, but it’s also a great thing if you are working at home. Working from home means that you are not in a cubicle at your office and you can choose to sit wherever, whenever. It also means that your desk doesn’t have to be too high off the ground or too far away from the TV.
What to consider when choosing a desk for your home office
When it comes to choosing a desk for your home office — be it a traditional, open plan or a small home-office interior — there are a few things you should consider, including height, size, materials and cost.
In this article we explore the questions: “Is this desk set up for me?” “How much space do I need in my home?” and “Can I get away with this desk setup?”
Size
The right desk is a crucial part of any office setup. You need to be able to do your work — and you also need to be able to do it comfortably. The right size desk can make that possible, and the right size desk can make you more productive — so choose wisely!
Our office is a very open space: we have a big standing desk, two small desks for individual use, a small low table for writing and one smaller table for our laptop, desk organiser, printer and phone. We also have a single file cabinet in the corner behind the door that holds all our paperwork.
The only thing that makes it difficult is the fact that there are three doors: one to get into the room (with room enough for my chair), one to get out of the room (room enough for my chair) and one to go back into the office (room enough for my chair).
Storage
You can afford to make a mistake when it comes to storage. We argue that your home may not be the best place to hide your files, but for many of us, it is. And there are a few reasons for that:
First, your office is probably going to be in the same house as your family. If you can’t have a dedicated space for your work and family, then you will find yourself spending more time on the phone than writing code.
Second, you are going to need a ton of storage space in order to support all of your projects and even more importantly, keep all of them organised (which itself doesn’t happen by accident). If you don’t have enough room for the things you need at home, then you are almost certainly going to end up spending more time organising and less time coding.
That said: we still recommend putting away all the stuff that doesn’t matter enough for you to justify keeping around anyway, even if you aren’t a digital nomad.
It does help if you put away stuff like those hard-to-get-rid-of books from 10 years ago but that can still serve as an excellent reminder about what worked before and what didn’t work before (but don’t feel like you have much choice here) — we did this with our books as well!
Budget
A lot of advertising and marketing advice tells you that you need to have a clear and simple message in mind when choosing your product. But, should you? The answer is no. There’s no reason to choose a solution that does more harm than good. In fact, you can get the best bang for your buck simply by reducing your costs (and therefore the price).
A common line of thinking says that it’s better to spend money on advertising than on any other marketing tool (like SEO, paid social, or paid search). I disagree — not if we are using it properly.
Advertising is best used as a supplement to your existing marketing tactics (purchased elsewhere), not as something to be the sole source of your marketing budget. That said, how do we know which ones are most effective? Which ones will help us reach our goals?
The answer is: they don’t have to be perfect — in fact, we need them to be riddled with mistakes. We need imperfection; we need mistakes; we need things that will lead us astray from our goals. These mistakes should lead us towards better alternatives and better solutions; and so these imperfections become part of our solution set (if not now then soon enough.)
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