10 Home Office Hacks

From Wharf​side​.Co​.Uk

Got this from Lifehacker.

What­ever kind of work you do at home, your office is one place you want to spend the time to make com­fort­able and con­ve­nient. Take 10 of our tips on orga­niz­ing, fix­ing, and stream­lin­ing that space.

10. Get more nat­ural or ambi­ent light

If you aren’t blessed with ample win­dows or non-annoying over­head light­ing, get­ting a bit of illu­mi­na­tion around your work­space can be accom­plished in ways more sub­tle, and less expen­sive, than adding more lamps. One of the Dumb Lit­tle Man blog’s 10 cheap home office improve­ments involves a strate­gi­cally placed mir­ror, which helps those with bright light going the wrong way re-capture it. When Jason was deep in his extreme home office makeover, he found that cheap rope lights made for great ambi­ent illu­mi­na­tion, espe­cially as the sun­light changes in early morn­ing and late afternoon.

9. Keep your PCs clean and quiet

For a ded­i­cated work desk, a desk­top PC makes sense—it’s far more bang for the buck, and you can use what­ever size mon­i­tor you’d like. But desk­top sys­tems tend to get dirty, hot, and louder over time. Luck­ily, you need only a can of com­pressed air, some house­hold oil, and a screw­driver to evac­u­ate PC dust bun­nies and get your sys­tem run­ning with lower drag again. If it’s just a noisy, case-shaking hard drive at the heart of your overly-audible sys­tem, try qui­et­ing it with rub­ber shocks or elas­tic sus­penders. Start­ing over with a new sys­tem? Build it for silence from the start, and you’ll hardly ever know your sys­tem is running.

8. Cover the non-obvious comforts

A really, seri­ously comfy chair. Wall col­ors other than white or beige. Extras of every­thing you occa­sion­ally run out of. You’ve prob­a­bly put a whole bunch of thought into the pre­cise lay­out of your com­puter desk­top, but the trim and details of your home office often go sorely under-attended. The tail end of Sara Rimer’s write-up about her per­fect home office expli­cates the niceties that made her work-from-home life much more bear­able. And read­ers gave up their own tips, like keep­ing the printer away from the com­puter (enforced away-from-screen breaks), and mak­ing the trash can and shred­der as uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble (clut­ter killers).

7. Install a wor­thy whiteboard

Even if you’re a total com­puter obses­sive, hav­ing a space to leave must-notice reminders and sketch out your thoughts. If the tiny-but-affordable mod­els at your local office store don’t do it for you, or you want some­thing a bit more per­son­al­ized, think out­side the wood-framed white. A glass ver­sion isn’t quite as high-contrast read­able, but cer­tainly durable and might work against a white wall. You could also grab some stick-on, remov­able dry erase sheets for those moments of fleet­ing big-picture inspi­ra­tion. Know a sup­pos­edly busted erase board about to hit the curb? Draw over the per­ma­nent marker or stuck-on erasable ink with another dry-erase marker, wipe it away, and you might be good as new. Need just a lit­tle reusable note space? Grab a CD “jewel” case and put one together. Any­where you’ve got a ver­ti­cal sur­face, you can make a magnetic-backed white­board with two coats of paint you can pick up at Home Depot.

6. Res­cue your fil­ing cabinet

It seems like every­one over a cer­tain age has a file cab­i­net of some sorts, but so many of them end up as sup­ple­men­tal shelf space clut­tered with paper, and some­times even the paper you would file inside it. That’s a pretty clear sign that something’s gone awry with your fil­ing sys­tem. Gina res­cued her own cab­i­net with bet­ter labels and a re-thinking of its pur­pose and use. The Sim­ple Dol­lar helps out those who mostly use their cab­i­net for finan­cial backup with the best doc­u­ment orga­niz­ing sys­tem. And if you’re the type to pull a folder and let it hang around, shame your­self into return­ing it by book­mark­ing its absence.

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