A few things that will make working from home more pleasant

In this blog post, I would love to share with you a few things that would make working from home a bit more pleasant and enjoyable even if you absolutely hate working from home.

More and more people start working from home these days, and while some people genuinely enjoy working from home and are pretty used to it for the other ones, it’s frightening strange and not very enjoyable. When the company where I currently work announced that we all will start working from home I wasn’t surprised because I saw it coming. However, I’m used to be a full-time travel blogger and a freelancer who works from home all the time. I also used to work at Expedia, where working from home was allowed and was even encouraged for some days per month.

So this post, I wanted to share with you my experience of working from home and how to make it more enjoyable even if it doesn’t seem right to you at all at the moment.

How to make working from home a bit more pleasant

Find or buy a perfect chair.

The first crucial thing for working from home is actually investing in a good chair. You might be asking why not start from a desk? Not everybody has a space in their flat or room for a proper desk, so many people have to improvise and use a kitchen table or a makeup table instead. So not everybody can find a space for a desk, especially if you live in a very very small place and if you’re renting the space.

A chair, on the contrary, doesn’t take that much space can always be used to sit when friends come over or when you work on something at home. It can also be a hanger for your clothes. Just kidding.

I already had a suitable desk at home and even a decent screen, however, I absolutely hated sitting at the desk; so I pretty much always found myself sitting on the sofa instead. As it turned out (when I bought a good chair) that the problem was not me, it was in the chair that I had which was uncomfortable.

The channel doesn’t have to be expensive cost thousands of pounds or hundreds of pounds I actually bought mine for £100, but you can buy similar ones for £60-£70 which shouldn’t be too bad. Now we are actually fighting with Pepe for the spot at the desk, so we had to introduce a rotation.

There are plenty of chairs you can order from Amazon, but I bought mine from Argos, and here’s an exact chair that I bought, but they also have quite a few other options, and they seem to be delivered faster than Amazon these days.

Find the right spot for your desk.

If you have a separate desk or if you just have a standard kitchen table, you can still move it a bit to find a place where the light would be comfortable for you to work. We live in a two-bedroom flat, so we had a desk in the guest bedroom which is pretty much always full of things and happens to be a storage of the items we don’t use that often.

Long story short this room had a spot for a table so so that’s where we placed the desk when we bought it in IKEA couple a year ago. Since we purchased it, both of us barely used it, and we couldn’t really understand why, until they moved the desks to the living room and put it in front of the window.

It made a tremendous difference! Now we have a massive demand for the work station – both of us want to work there. The reallocation of the desk also somehow made our flat homier (and cramped at the same time).

Download a couple of productivity apps

If you find it hard to concentrate when you’re working from home, I hope this advice will be useful. Instead of trying to focus all the time, make sure to download a productivity app like Flora where you can set a timer for a certain period of time during which you promised yourself to be productive. If you need to finish your latest report or schedule a new campaign, this is a lifesaver.

You can allocate half an hour 45 minutes or an hour and put all the things aside, and that helps you split your long day into smaller chunks during which you can be productive and achieve higher results. I noticed that I’m more productive when I feel a bit of pressure and having a timer on adds this kind of pressure to your work.

Propose daily video stand-ups with your team

In case when you don’t have too many meetings set up, and you feel disconnected from your team or your colleagues, you can solve that by proposing or even organising a set of daily stand-ups. You can have them in one of the videoconferencing apps like Zoom or Teams or Bluejeans. They don’t necessarily have to be long: they can only be 15 minutes where you simply see the faces of all of your colleagues, have a quick catch up and ask how everybody is doing. You can discuss some issues and blockers that you might have. You can even go one step further and propose to set up a virtual lunch maybe once a week.

Think of some great benefits of working from home

If you implemented all the above and you still don’t find working from home enjoyable at all you can think of some excellent benefits of working from home. Of course, that depends on where are you located and how far from your work are you living.

Generally, most people, especially people living in London, find it more delightful when you don’t need to commute for at least half an hour or on average an hour or even longer in overcrowded, cramped London underground. Moreover, you are saving at least £135 if you are living within zones 1 & 2 if London. If you leave in the 3rd zone just like me, you’re spending even more on transport. If you happen to live in one of the commuter towns, that’s even more significant saving. You can also save money on coffees you might be getting every day and on lunches that could also be quite expensive. Instead, make sure to prepare something delicious for lunch tonight beforehand so that you can have your lunch ready and waiting for you.

If you have a family, think of it as a unique opportunity to spend more time with your family.

You can organise your day how you want it to be

Another benefit of working from home is an opportunity to organise your working day how you want it to be. Since you don’t need to commute in the morning, you can do some exercise or start working earlier, so you can finish sooner.

You can talk to take multiple breaks throughout the day if that helps you to be more productive.

Alright, I hope you found this post about how to make working from home more pleasant was useful and you won’t hate working from home anymore. If you have any other great tips, please share them with me in the comments below.

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