Only just a few months ago, the acronym WFH was a foreign one. But today after almost an entire year of enforced lockdown, the acronym WFH has become synonymous with our current lifestyle.
Nevertheless, there are those who are still adjusting to this new norm. After all, humans are social creatures with a desire for human contact. That as well as the fact that many find that they are unable to work from home due to the many disturbances.
While there have been many tips, guides, and tricks teaching you how to keep your kid away from your work space, and setting up invisible barriers to keep your space and sanity without the buffer of being able to have some alone time in the car while travelling to and fro your office, here are a few more from a legit WFH person who has been working from home years before COVID-19 even existed.
Turn Up the Music
Not viable if you are in a meeting, but definitely a yes if you are trying to focus on your work with lots of cooking, banging, and yelling going on in other parts of the house.
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Condition Your Mind to “Enter Work Mode”
Spotify should be your new best friend if you have transitioned to working from home. Create a calming instrumental playlist on your Spotify, that will drown out the outside noises as well as help you maintain a tranquil mood as you work. Not only will the music help you maintain the right frame of mind while you work, but you will also be able to train your mind to "enter work mode” when a selected playlist comes on.
Playlists Make for Great Mood Setters and Time Trackers
This does not however mean that you are confined to only one playlist. You can create a playlist to zen your mind to work mode, and another one to energise you before meetings. Selected songs can also be cues to get up from your work seat to dance and move about, depending on where you place them in your playlist.
Playlists also make for great time trackers, because for example if the entire playlist is an hour long, when it repeats you will know that an hour has passed. You will not need to consciously track this – your mind will automatically register this after a while.
Set Up Your Office Space
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There are a lot of guides that have brought this up before, but let’s add a twist to this tip. Most office workers are used to the office setting of either having a cubicle or a large open space work desk. But what most office workers are also unaware of is that they were conditioned to work in a setting like that, and this may not necessarily be their best work setting.
Now that you are working from home, you are free to set up your space however you like. Play around with your space and discover what you really like. You do need a large space to work from home. It can be a spot by the window overlooking the road outside, or even a table that looks into the kitchen because it is the favourite area of your house.
Make the table comfy and attractive to you. It can be an inexpensive foldable square table which the author of this article is using, but you can get a throw cloth from IKEA to zest it up and hide your feet under when you are cold. In fact, because you can finally create your own space, you can even set up a Japanese style living area with a low table and sit on the floor if you like.
The most important thing is to create a space that you love going to everyday because this is the spot that you will be spending the most time at in your house daily. And because it is part of your home, you do not want to start hating it.
Get the Proper Furniture
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You know all those times when you wished that the HR department would buy more ergonomic chairs so that you wouldn’t have to find the right-sized pillows to fill out your chair properly and still get backaches anyway? Or perhaps if you are really short or tall, you would have wished for a height-adjustable table.
Now that you will be working from home long term, fulfill all your wishes and desires! Invest in a height-adjustable table and ergonomic chair. It doesn’t even have to be an office chair – if you find a wooden garden chair comfortable because you can sit cross-legged on it, you can even use that as your office chair because no one can tell you “no” anymore.
Have Fun With Your Work Space!
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Other than that, you can also make your working life more fun at home. Once you learn how to create a personal space and work space for yourself, you will start appreciating having your loved ones around you more often.
To lighten up your work space, you can now even turn on Netflix while you are working to make work a little less tedious and boring. After all, most work tracking apps only take screenshots of your desktop. So if it’s not feasible to install a television at your new work space, get your backup laptop out or your stand your phone beside your laptop and turn on your old favourites on Netflix. Similar to listening to music, your mind will appreciate the background entertainment and may just surprise you with even more great ideas to contribute to your work.
There are many other small details to sprucing up your personal work space that will mean a lot in the long run when you start working from home. These ideas will however only become known to you once you begin to understand what you really like about having in a work space.
So go with the flow, have fun working from home, and welcome to the new norm!
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