8 Tips to Create An Organized & Productive Home Office |
- 8 Tips to Create An Organized & Productive Home Office
- Fresh Resources for Designers and Developers – March 2013
- Lumio – The Versatile Book Lamp
8 Tips to Create An Organized & Productive Home Office Posted: 28 Feb 2013 10:13 PM PST One of the greatest benefits of a home office is the freedom to decorate and design your home office as you wish, but without letting either space lose their distinct identity. In other words, we shouldn’t blend the workplace with the rest of our personal space, aka home. Whether you call your ‘home office’ a blessing or a curse, one thing’s for sure, your mood and your productivity will be affected by how it is set up. Just as a cluttered desk is a cluttered mind, a disorganized home office may be the source of unnecessary mind-blocks to new ideas and solutions. Think your home office is a mess and is ruining your productivity? Not to worry, because today we’ll be covering 10 great tips to improve the organization of your home office meant to turn you more productive, keep the working mood positive and get back that focus you need to produce top-quality work. Recommended Reading: Inspirational Workspace: 60 Awesome Setups 1. Don’t Mix Work With Personal LifeWe’ll start with the most evident tip, blending work and pleasure as one. Even with the firmest intention to separate the both of them in your home office at the initial stage, the two is bound to mix since your office is in your home.
‘Don’t take your work home with you’ doesn’t apply to SOHO workers. What to do:Examine your home office from time to time to see how much of your workspace has been infested with distractions. Resolve to clear away your TV, game consoles, and other forms of distractions and keep them out of sight. Maintain that boundary within your home where work begins and ends. Keep this workspace as distinct from your other rooms as possible because such differentiation can have a psychological effect on how you divide work and play. Recommended Reading: 10 tip to make "Working from home" work for you 2. Get Good Seating SupportAre you getting the seat support you need? You may not think comfort and support matter to your productivity, because who has the time to enjoy a real good work chair when engrossed with tons of work? As it turns out, that is precisely the reason why you should take note of your seating support if you are spending most of your time sitting on your chair when working.
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, about 90% of adults experience back pain at some point in their life, and 50% of the working population has back pain every year in the US. When you don’t pay attention to your back, the desk chair can take a toll on your health, mood and consequently your work productivity. What to do:Here’s a comprehensive guide if you’re keen on getting an ergonomically designed desk chair. If you are a little tight on budget, consider purchasing a seat support for your desk chair. 3. Invest in Better LightingsWe often neglect the lighting. Is your desk lamp too bright or too dim to work under, effectively? Are you getting sufficient natural light, the best kind, from the Sun? To have that, make sure your designated workspace has enough windows or openings to let the sunlight in.
Research has shown that people feel lethargic during winter months due to the lack of exposure to sunlight. The exposure can boost your mood and improve your sleep patterns. In times of unfavorable weather or long working nights, it is essential to get some artificial lighting in your workspace. What to Do:Experiment with different intensities or light tones to find out which one works best for you. Depending on how spacious your workspace is, you might also consider having multiple and different light fixtures to set a comfortable mood for work. Try to get multiple light fixtures, and at least a desk lamp with direct exposure over your desk, which will facilitate the reading, writing or sketching of documents. If, however, you do your work mostly on your computer, check out this simple reference on optimal brightness and contrast for your eyes. 4. Keep Your Tech Updated & ReliableIf you’re going to be working at home most of the time, you’ve got to make sure that technology is your best accomplice. Do you get frequent technical faults with your existing devices such as your computer, printer or connections? If you do, I’m sure it is a major source of frustration at work. Chances are that you are holding on to your old devices and gadgets because they still work and you don’t find it economical to pay for an upgrade. Well, think about how much time you’ve wasted instead, trying to troubleshoot and fix them, plus the ‘opportunity cost‘ you’ve lost. And don’t forget the negative effect it has on your mood! System crashes and data loss near an important deadline can cause more damage than it is worth. What to do:Update your computer antivirus software and OS and conduct regular maintenance checks on your devices. Keep important information backed up at intervals. 5. Augment Your TechnologyThe other thing to consider about your home office technology is the additional features that some of your gadgets, devices and software have to offer. After working for a while, you should have an idea of what you might be missing in your home office that might significantly facilitate your work. What to do:Stop procrastinating and begin by listing down those features that will allow you to get things done more efficiently. For instance, if you’re a graphic designer, ask yourself if a second monitor can help speed things up. 6. Simplify ProcessesHave you complicated your home office and work processes so much so that it has become too overwhelming to work anymore? If so, it’s time to go back to basics – simplify. Remember that the key to an organized office is efficiency, and the more things you have around, the harder it is to keep everything in order.
A typical disorganized office is when you have difficulties finding where you keep your documents. A workspace organized in too complex a manner causes may seem neat on the surface but will cause a lot of sorting or filing problems as there are too many categories. What to do:Keep things clean and minimal. When you over-organized, you will tend to procrastinate keeping your workspace neat because it’s too time-consuming and tedious. Eventually, you get clutter. This not only applies to just the physical layout of your work area; it is the same in your computer. Sort for easy access. The general rule is to keep the desktop as clear as possible with only a few files or apps that you’re working on. Maintain a minimalistic organization and a clean desk (keep ugly wires out of sight with these gadgets) so your mind won’t wander from one thing to another that easily. You’ll feel less stressed and less distracted from your task. 7. Expand Your Workspace or Storage SystemAre your documents piling up because of your prospering business? If it is, it’s time to consider expanding the physical space of your home office. The rule of thumb for any room or space is the lesser clutter you have, the fewer your distractions will be.
If you have the tendency to leave things lying around, a pile of clutter will form before you even realize it. However, when you increase the amount of physical space, it will take longer for that to happen. The extra space will also make your workspace look less cramped, hence, neater. What to do:What if you have no room for expansion? You should consider investing in some fine storage solutions such as a filing cabinet, shelves, files and folders. For Ideas: 34 Creative Furniture That Stand Out From The Rest Sure, the room may still look cramp with cabinets and shelves, but not seeing piles and piles of documents when you’re working may just be good enough to calm your nerves for the rest of the day. Of course, if you don’t want a hard time finding these documents when you need them, you must label them accordingly and have periodic filing sessions to manage your paperwork. 8. Incorporate Personal Touch & InspirationIn spite of #1, there should be some leeway on what you can place in your workspace for that personal touch and inspiration to an otherwise, sterile office environment. Note that the purpose of these items or design is to help you sustain that positive mood and energy to work on your tasks. They can include anything: decor, plants, pets, photographs or posters. If you’re feeling a sense of dread working in your home office, ask yourself what would inspire you and keep you going? It could be your family, your kids, your goals, your favorite art pieces, the scenery outside your window, or even the mere sight of your favorite color. What to do:If you require a lot of creativity thinking for your work, then be sure to put in place things that help you spawn ideas and capture them, such as a sketchpad to doodle on or catch ideas that suddenly pop up. The decor itself can have a huge impact on your mood as well, as do the furniture, so put some thought into those two. Incorporate a certain style or theme for your home office that you can identify with. If you’re going to spend some time in your home office, you’ll want to make sure you have pleasant surroundings to work in. For More Ideas: 55 Popular Pinterest Pinboards For Your Office Decor Inspirations Experimentation is KeyIn some ways, an organized and productive home office takes a lot of experimentation and a bit of luck before you can get it just right. You will find yourself experimenting with new technology, organization, processes and designs, and balancing it with your budget for the perfect home office. Time-consuming it may be, it is still an enjoyable process to observe how your home office evolve. Have fun! |
Fresh Resources for Designers and Developers – March 2013 Posted: 28 Feb 2013 10:15 PM PST It’s that time of the month again to share awesome tools and resources fit for designers and developers. This round we got plugins to help your site detect swipes and gestures as well as to enable mention input, a tool to creat your own stickman comics and a new tool to test your codes on Internet Explorer. Check out all our fresh resources (according to month): App Icon TemplateIn our previous post, we have covered how to create your app icons with a third party tool. Alternatively, if you are like me, who prefer customizability, you can try App Icon Template. his PSD template comes with Photoshop Action scripts that lets you convert your design into iOS-compatible formats on the fly, both for Retina or non-Retina devices.
Touch SwipeToday, as there are more devices that are equipped with Touch Screen, you might want to consider enabling the multi-touch ability for your website. To do this, try Touch Swipe, a jQuery plugin that can detect swipes and finger gestures on your website. This plugin supports several gestures, including finger swipe, pinch, and zoom. SpectagramIn previous post, Jake has shown you how to build Instagram instant search using Instagram API from scratch. There is also a ready-to-use jQuery plugin, like Spectagram. Spectagram fetches the Instagram API and displays the result on your website or application. It currently supports displaying Instagram user feed, popular photos, and user-tagged photos.
MouMarkDown is a plain text formatting language that can be converted into HTML markup. We can write in MarkDown format with any code editor, or use a designated editor like Mou. Mou comes with syntax highlighting, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, HTML and CSS export, etc. The interface is neat and simple consisting of two columns. You can write the MarkDown format at the left, and see the result immediately on the right. Unfortunately, Mou is only available for OSX at the moment.
jQuery Mention InputIf you are using Twitter or Facebook, you are certainly familiar with Mention; we can include a friend’s name into a post or tweet, typically with a To run this plugin, we need at least jQuery version 1.6 and Underscores.js. For more technical details, head over to this page.
BlokkfontBlokkfont is a font for mock-ups and wireframing that contains only block and rectangular characters as previewed in the following screenshot. If you are against using conventional Lorem Ipsum, this font is a really good alternative. It is available as a desktop font (in .ttf) and webfont.
Comix.ioYou don’t have to good at drawing to create a comic. You can simply use Cmx (read Comix), a web based editor for creating xkcd style comic stripe. The comic graphical output will not be an image like in a traditional comic, instead it is built with HTML and SVG.
RooleRoole is a JavaScript-based CSS Pre-processor. It has a list of features that are inspired by other CSS preprocessor (LESS, Sass and Stylus) such as Nesting Rules, Indentation, Variables, Mixins, Functions, Operation, and Extending style rules (like in Sass). Roole also provides built-in vendor prefixes, so we can write complex CSS3 rules in a simple way.
HintHint is a CSS library containing a set of styles rules for creating a simple tooltip. The tooltip is built with CSS3 Transition, CSS3 property, pseudo-element, and data attribute. It is a good alternative to JavaScript-based tooltip. Head over to the following page to see it in action: Hint.css Demo
Modern.ieTesting websites for Internet Explorer has always been unpleasant, as IE has several versions that have their own quirks and behaviour. Fortunately, Microsoft realizes this and has introduced a tool to make the web developer’s job less painful with Modern.ie. Modern.ie is a set of tools for testing websites in Internet Explorer, in old and modern versions. It will scan the webpage to find compatibility issues and return suggestions to fix the issues. |
Lumio – The Versatile Book Lamp Posted: 28 Feb 2013 11:46 PM PST Lightings play a huge role in creating the right mood, and the perfect ambience in a room, but the problem with the lighthing fixtures is that they are quite inflexible. Light fixtures are usually stuck to a wall or a ceiling. Lamps are the mobile alternative but they are rarely remotely interestingly designed.
Lumio changes all that. Created by Max Gunawan, an Architect / Industrial designer based in San Francisco, Lumio is the light source you can bring along with you, everywhere you go. And if you want it to stay in one spot, it can do that too. Best of all, you can store it up like it’s a book! We found the concept behind Lumio very interesting. It’s a versatile, stylishly designed, and working light source. You can move from one place to another without Lumio leaving your side. Plus, it can be fixed upon a surface like a fan or a lantern design, or hung from the ceiling, giving you the room to be creative with your home decor. Lumio can be mounted onto a concrete wall or a metal surface with the use of magnets, specially designed by the creator to work on any surface. The cover of Lumio is made out of FSC certified wood which is water resistant. The magnets needed to hold Lumio up on any surface is encased in the cover. The Lumio has a rechargeable lithium ion battery that can last up to 8 hours on a single charge, even with constant use of 12 hours a day. The battery for this lighting is not replaceable but worry not, as it can last approximately 5 years. The light source, a high output LED can last 6 years, and actually longer if you don’t mind a dimmer light. The brightness can be controlled by adjusting the opening of Lumio. For example, if you want it to produce a lot of light, open up Lumio to 180 degrees. If you want it to produce a little light, just open Lumio a little. You can separately connect Lumio to a dimmer for better light control. Although Lumio’s creator is looking for $60,000 to fund the creation and the production of Lumio on Kickstarter, currently, it has raised more than $300,000. Lumio project backers who pledge $95 for it now will receive a Lumio during the second batch of production and should expect to receive it around September 2013. |
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