Working from home? Do these 11 things to make your home office productive
In multi-unit buildings, get to know your neighbors before setting up a work-from-home office
This post is part of a series entitled “Working Fluently From Home.” Click here for the archived posts.
I never thought I would hate the sound of nail polish bottles. In fact, when I was in elementary school, I had a large book full of different nail designs. (After doing manicures, puppy paw designs were my favorite.) Although I’m no longer a fingernail design fanatic, I’m still a stickler about polished toes.
And for six of seven years of owning my condo unit, I would’ve frowned at anybody who said they cringed at nail polish bottles. I have a plastic bin filled with them. But then my prior upstairs neighbor (an elderly woman who used her condo unit as a home for her plants) moved out, and a new neighbor moved in.
The latter neighbor and I both have work-from-home jobs. While mine is about 25% dog walking and 75% a combination of journalism, editing and writing, hers is more colorful: She’s a nail technician (who once gave me free cuticle oil). But because she has a day job, majority of her manicures are completed on weekends and cleaning up is done during late-night hours.
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The problem? When you’re at a spa and dropping nail polish bottles into a basket or sliding them around on a shelf, you don’t hear the sound. But someone dropping nail polish bottles on a laminate floor at 11 p.m. sounds like a glass crashing. And moving her privacy partition sounds about as loud as dragging a couch across the floor. My dog takes off running and hides under my legs, quietly growling at the noise it makes. Within the first month, I missed my botanical elderly neighbor so much. And it felt like the manicures were haunting me.
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Even worse, the area in which the “nail salon” is located is directly above where my home office is in my living room. So when she has customers, I get to hear all of the stomping around as they arrive, find the nail polish of their choice and a little bit of chatter. I immediately started wondering where else I could move my desk and all of my electrical equipment — or would I have to go back to sitting at my bedroom desk all day again (with less sunlight and a smaller TV).
Although this wasn’t a home office fail I could’ve predicted, it was one of 11 lessons I learned about creating a productive home office. Here are the other 10.
10 tips for creating a productive home office
1. No, a desk by the windows isn’t always a good idea.
If you’re easily distracted, moving a desk near a busy street window is just asking for procrastination. You’ll start people watching and paying attention to things that you would’ve never noticed, such as that one guy who never picks up his dog’s poop or those contractors who have conversations way too loud during their lunch break.