Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Designing Your Home Office For High Productivity

By R. Landis

You can ensure the maximum in your personal productivity by carefully planning and designing your home office workspace. When it is possible, you should resist the idea of turning a small area of your bedroom or living room into your business office. Your ideal workspace should be a separate room with a door you can close that keeps your business activities in and family members out. If you are unable to do this, you will need to find a way to convert a room with a partition or find yourself doing most of you work while everyone is away or sleeping.

Your work area should include a dedicated telephone line, a nice size workstation, your computer, printer and other types of technology that you may need. You will also need a place, to keep your files, paperwork, books and magazines.

Since you will want to enjoy your time working, you can place some reminders about your office area, such as a family photograph, you can simply place it on one of your shelves. These items can help you to remember the best things about working from your home. You can keep other areas of your life nearby in order to stay focused on the reasons why you are working so hard. You want to remember that you are doing this for a better lifestyle for your family and yourself.

Eliminating clutter is ideal of course, however if you need to keep items out and available for your use you should do so. When you are efficient, there is no strict system that you must work with. Your goal is business success. If this means that, you work from a rebuilt walk in closet that is great. You want to set up your workspace in a manner that offers you the most efficiency.

In order to achieve the maximum productivity you want to make sure that your office and workspace is ergonomically designed. Ergonomic expert agree that you can increase your productivity by 20 percent when you have a good design. Read a few books that explain ergonomics, such as the placement of your keyboard and monitor as well as lighting, chair size, body and sitting position. You can create a productive working environment by using the proper ergonomic office layout and design.

The essential key for staying organized is all about managing your business, having the systems in place to do your work. It is not about the type of filing system you use. You want to establish your routine in order to achieve as much as possible every workday. It is the small things that help you stay efficient every day you work, such as making a to-do list at the end of the day. Use a single calendar to work from to keep your completed jobs on schedule. You will also want to include your personal and family activities into your work calendar, as this is essential.

Carefully planning out-of-office client meetings in blocks, such as an entire morning, afternoon or day, may reduce the travel time if the clients are in one area. However, taking a large block of time to drive all over the place may leave you unavailable to other customers for too long. Therefore, you might schedule two short trips out of the office to two specific areas in which to meet clients.

Remember to include both your high and low priority items on your to-do list. Remember you need to take the time to return telephone calls or business emails. You will need to know the schedules of those you interact with on a regular basis such as vendors and others. You should make a note when you have vendors that are available only during the early hours. You will also need to incorporate your schedule with others when it is necessary and you will need to allow for the differences of various time zones. - 16928

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