My office

A couple of posts ago, I told you my story
Now I would like to show you a bit more of my environment, and I would also like to take the time to discuss the existence of an ideal environment for blogging.

After a working day at my desk, the first thing I like to do when I get home is throw myself at the couch. This couch throwing also includes watching some TV, read a book, read some blogs and check my e-mail. When I started blogging, this seemed to be the ideal environment for me: in the couch, laptop on my tummy and blog blog blog.
Now that I’m already doing this for some time, I noticed that this “ideal environment” might need some reconsidering, as I get very easily distracted and after a certain period of time my back starts to hurt. So there were some questions raised: “Do I need a new, ‘real’ office?”, “Won’t such a real office make blogging look too much like real work?”, “where should it be located?”, “what accessories do I need?”. Lots of stuff to think about, and lots of decisions to be made.

While reading some blogs, I found the article “10 Unconscious cues to create a work/life balance” at Jonathan Fields, which already gave me an idea of how the professionals handle this.
Shortly summarized, what they’re saying is that it your work environment at home needs to look like you’re at the office of a/your company. This means that you need to have a separate room, you need to shower and get dressed before you start, you need to agree with your family that they don’t disturb you during working hours, you need to take breaks and you need to stop working at a predefined hour.
Now I have to say that these are tips for people who work at home for a living, so I don’t think it works the same for me, but I could find some improvements for myself too.

After googling the terms “home office”, “blogging desk” and “blogging office”, it was time to try to give myself a first answer on the questions I had.

Do I need a new, ‘real’ office?
At the moment, I think I don’t. I can just write my weekly post from my couch and also the creation of the website doesn’t take such an amount of time that I need the feeling of being in an office.
But hey, I do have the ambition to start writing more and more in the future, so it might be a good idea to already start thinking about some kind of work space that keeps me focused.

Won’t such a real office make blogging look too much like real work?
Honestly? I think it does.
But then I ask myself the question “what’s wrong with something looking like a job when you like doing it?”. When you like doing something, doesn’t matter if it’s writing or sporting or playing tic tac toe, you could do it all day and all night, right? So if you create your own tic tac toe room, it might feel that you’re a professional, but will that keep you from doing it? I guess not.

Where should it be located?
When you’re really considering going into the blogging business, and you already made your business case, then maybe you could rent an office somewhere, because who knows that after some time you’ll need to hire 4 other bloggers, a secretary and an accountant.
Well, I told you that I’m ambitious, but maybe not that much. So the location will need to be somewhere inside the house. Lucky as I am, I have a spare room, of which I don’t have an idea yet what to do with it. It’s unfinished, it doesn’t have any power sockets yet, the light doesn’t work and it certainly needs some new painting or I will become depressed, but I have the space, so there’s a start.

Which accessories do I need?
Maybe it’s a female side of me (sorry ladies) but I like desk accessories. When I start thinking about decorating my desk, I think of pencil cups, letter trays, business card holders, memo cubes, a fax machine, a paper shredder, that kind of stuff. But do I really need that? Probably not eh…
So let’s start with the basic accessories: desk (check) , laptop (check), printer (check), big leather chair that says “Chief Executive” (not check, but probably my regular chair will work just fine too). What else? Maybe some pictures for on the wall? A radio? Most likely I have the basics, and when I’m actually sitting in my home office -sounds already quite professional – I’ll find out soon enough what else I’m missing.

You may have noticed that I haven’t sort it all out, yet. So any help is welcome. Do you have a home office? Do you feel the need to have one? Do you have a great idea on how to decorate mine? Let me know!

My current "office"

My new office

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