Home office set up suggestions please!

[alohamom]

...rather than go upstairs, then get sidetracked with snacks and a 'quick' conversation with mom.

HAHAHA, no kidding! Yup, he will basically have a suite type of set up. That thought kind of feeds into what @BadPinkTink mentioned below

I live with my mom, and work time is do not disturb time. I make sure to tell her the night before that I will be working the following day. If its urgent she will text me, otherwise it waits until lunch time or when I finish at 4.30pm

We had a little family meeting this morning to talk about this very issue. My hubby is the one who needed the gentle reminder that DS will be working and that we all need to treat it as no different than if he was in the Toronto studio, away from the house. I like that you tell your mom the night before, sounds like some pretty good communication happening there!

 

[BadPinkTink]

We had a little family meeting this morning to talk about this very issue. My hubby is the one who needed the gentle reminder that DS will be working and that we all need to treat it as no different than if he was in the Toronto studio, away from the house. I like that you tell your mom the night before, sounds like some pretty good communication happening there!

exactly, when I went to clients offices, my mom wouldn't randomly call me for a chat, as I was at work. Its just the same now, except that I am at home. And thanks, its not easy to move back home as an adult child running a business, and we have had some interesting times, but over all we manage.

 

[bankr63]

I think it was @SteveH who first posted this, but I agree that the most important think for an office is a view. I have a full office down in the basement. Never use it, the cat litter pans now reside under the desk. For years I have been working from our kitchen area which has a view out over the forest behind our house. Locking into a basement space is worse than being locked into cube farm.

Now that DW is working from home (teacher) we converted an upstairs bedroom with a view over the neighborhood to an office space. No visitors for a while anyway, so the bed won't be missed.

I am seriously considering a major conversion to our home to truly integrate office space. I think this may be the next wave in home design as the "new normal" will probably include a lot more working from home. We haven't used our formal dining room area in years, so with a bit of room flipping, I am hoping to have a 2-seater office with view of the forest.

The one thing I do have is a proper office chair (Staples will be happy to deliver one to your door). I also use a 2nd monitor in addition to my laptop (which has a large 17" HD screen). Back in the 80's when I started my career as a computer technologist and programmed regularly, I had 4 monitors in my cubefarm space. Pens and paper - rarely used. I just keep things on the notepad app on the computer or my phone. I do keep a scratch pad nearby, maybe fill up a page a week.

 

[alohamom]

Thanks for all of your insight everyone. I have been talking to my DS and sharing your ideas. He and I are grateful for all the tips!

 

[cslittle999]

My home office setup has a powered standing desk, a great chair, a 34 inch wide screen monitor on a monitor arm, my laptop on an adjustable riser (this it just another monitor arm with an accessory), keyboard and magic pad (instead of a mouse).

The monitor arms, beyond getting the monitor at the right level, free up the space under the monitors for sticky notes, ...

I also have a 4x3 double sided rolling white board.

The key thing with multiple monitors is getting at least 2k. You want the extra pixels. They cost more but are worth it in the end.

I do have a web cam on top of my monitor instead of using the one on my laptop so I look straight forward when on a video call. I haven’t needed to get special lighting.

Happy to share a picture if you’re interested.

 

[alohamom]

I also have a 4x3 double sided rolling white board.

How often do you find you use your white board?
We have a large family one that we are considering putting in there.

 

[cslittle999]

How often do you find you use your white board?
We have a large family one that we are considering putting in there.

Once a week. It’s a personal work style thing. I like think through ideas standing up. I end up taking a picture of the board and sharing it with the team I‘m working with. A group of people work through a design on a white board is what I miss most about not working in an office. There are online solutions to this but none of them are as good,

 

[SteveH]

@alohamom white board are good for a lot of computer science fields, we had one for my son during his undergrad and he used it a lot. I'd say he did used it a lot more during his internships with the national lab, for him it was a good way to work through challenges - and it got him off his chair so that's another plus. We ended up with a 6x8 wall mount just because I was able to get rid of an old one at work that we'd had in storage.

 

[Best_Vacation_EVER!]

Definitely a good chair is vital --- bad posture can lead to neck pain, back pain, headaches, etc... An adjustable desk is also ideal -- they have really reasonably priced manual ones that do the job nicely.

Working in IT, using multiple monitors is also pretty common. Usually would have email/office/web conference stuff on one and the coding/infrastructure stuff on the other (pretty much defacto now as to how we work in our office now.) As long as his device supports multiple monitors the dongles/connectors are pretty cheap.

Ergonomic keyboard and mouse also very important.

If he'll be on the phone a lot - a bluetooth headset is really helpful. during long meetings and/or if you need to be able to type or multi-task while working --- plus with the microphone being closer to your mouth you don't get as much background noise (dogs, doorbells, etc...) on calls.

Lighting is important since staring a screen while coding is really tough on the eyes. Blue light that most devices throw off but there are whole sites devoted to suggesting proper lighting. Lighting may be as simple as switching bulbs. If not possible then sometimes screen filters can help as well.

Speakers, a fan (for air circulation and white noise), a wall or desk clock (yeah I know they have clocks on phones and other devices but back in my coding days I would literally spend hours heads down with no sense of time at all. Having a physical clock was something I found helpful.)

Working at home as an IT professional due to COVID-19 I find I work mostly online (so while at the office I'd use a printer/paper, whiteboard, etc...) but there are a lot of online collaborative tools in play now (meeting, document collaboration, web conferencing, etc...) so some of the things you'd traditionally use aren't really as necessary.