Essentials for a Productive Home Office

With the rise of the internet, a larger presence of laptops and PCs in homes and a huge boost in the visible success of E-commerce companies, an increasing number of business people are opting to take their company to the virtual realm. One of the main benefits of this is being able to work from home. After all, you don’t need a commercial property or rented office space to operate an online store. Working from home comes hand in hand with all sorts of benefits. You can wave goodbye to stressful early morning commutes and uncomfortable or restrictive working uniforms. However, you still need to make sure that you are focussed and productive in order to keep your business moving forward. This is why so many people choose to create a home office in this situation. This helps to separate home life and work life, keeping distractions at bay and offering you a professional environment to work in. But if you’re considering setting up a home office, what should you fill it with? Well, read on to find out some home office essentials that you can’t go without!

Key Home Office Essentials

A Desk

Sure, we might want to work from the comfort of a sofa and with laptops, tablets, and smartphones this seems like a legitimate option. But will you really be productive when seated like this? When we’re overly comfortable, we tend to let our thoughts stray. Who knows, you might even nod off to sleep! Instead, you should invest in a proper desk to work from. Being seated upright puts you in the right frame of mind for work. It’s also better for your posture, reducing your chances of developing health problems down the line.

A Printer

Choosing an office printer is by no means a simple decision to make. Chances are that you’ll spend a while scrolling through all of the different options that are available to you. Things become even more difficult when you remember that you are catering to a home office – while you want your printing to be high-quality and processed quickly, your machine probably isn’t going to need to meet the requirements of a large scale office and multiple users. The good news is that thanks to the small scale demand that will be placed on the printer, you can probably opt for something smaller and cheaper than the huge devices that most large companies purchase.

Now, what you should bear in mind when comparing models is the amount of ink that each device uses. Ink can be notoriously expensive and by opting for a printer that has cheaper ink, you’ll find that you won’t have to fork out quite so much each time the tank or cartridge empties. You should check that suppliers such as 123inkjets stock the type of ink that your desired printer uses, as they can offer cartridges at a much lower price than you’d find when buying directly from the manufacturer. You should also consider each printer’s speed. Back in the day, print speed was measured by CPM or “characters per minute”, but as word processing has developed, we have more font styles and sizes available to us, so this unit of measurement has become a little outdated. Instead, look for print speed measurement in pages per minute. This should give you a more general idea of how long you’ll be waiting for longer documents to be printed out.

Storage

You need your paperwork to be organised at all times. When you need to draw something up, you should know exactly where it is and be able to retrieve it in a matter of moments. You’d be surprised just how much time is wasted rifling through drawers for lost contracts, plans, or notes. So, invest in effective storage. This could be in the form of paper folders and files organised onto bookshelves or something a bit more specialist and complex. Whatever you choose, make sure you have a consistent system that you stick to.

These are just a few bits and bobs that you will probably find yourself in need of once you start working from your home office. They are relatively general and the majority of us will use them at some point or another. As time goes on and you settle in, you’ll start to notice more niche items or tools that you will need and can start to implement them too. Your home office will come together in no time and you’ll have a healthy and productive environment to work in!

Image credit:  Pexels.com

Let’s connect on social