I’ve been working at home since the start of March, and will likely be working from home through 2020. So, I have invested in some changes to my working area (formerly known as ‘the spare room’) that will make it a more comfortable environment for remote work.
Here’s a quick rundown of the big and small changes I’ve made to make my WFH life more comfortable:
Painting the Wall
I recently wrote about how I did this in detail, but I wanted to repeat it again because this has made such a difference. Going from a blank white wall to this explosion of colour lifts my spirits every time I come into the room.
Stand up!
I invested in two stands for my desk, as I have both a laptop and a monitor on a pretty small desk area and I wanted to maximise space!
The Rain Design mStand360 Laptop stand has been a lifesaver. Its much more comfortable to type on for my arms when the laptop is raised, and also elevates the screen to more of my natural eye height – ergonomic wins all round!
The other cool thing about this particular laptop stand is that it swivels, which helps more than you might think it would. I’m finding that my position naturally shifts at my desk during the day, depending on what area of the desk I’m primarily focusing on. The fact that my laptop can easily swivel with me is an added bonus.
The Homfa Monitor Stand was the piece that I was most looking forward to arriving.
I don’t know about you, but I like to keep a ton of little things on my desk – pre the Monitor Stand, these little bits and bobs would just be cluttering up the desk itself with no set ‘homes’ and I’d constantly be having to move them out of the way.
But this Monitor Stand solves this ingeniously because its not just a monitor stand! It has two other inbuilt layers for storage, which I now use to store all of the things that I need at hands reach.
It also puts the monitor at a much better height for using it, which again, means I’m getting those ergonomic wins.
Rejuvenation Station
Part of the aforementioned ‘little things’ that now have a permanent home on my desk include what I call my rejuvenation toolkit. Things that help keep me hydrated and rejuvenated throughout the day. There are 5 main things I use on a daily basis:
Hard-Working Hand Protector, Body Shop – great for hydrating your hands, particularly if like me, your hands are even dryer than usual thanks to the constant hand-washing! I tend to use a little blob of it at the start of my day and another little blob mid-afternoon.
Hand Cleansing gel, Soap + Glory – this anti-bacterial gel is helping keep my newly found germphobia at bay. I take a little spritz after I handle ‘outside’ things like packages, which makes my paranoia feel a bit better 😫
Lip balm, KNDR – I recently wrote about this as it came as part of my April Birchbox! I’ve co-opted it as my ‘desk lip balm’ and I use it multiple times a day to keep my lips feeling soft and fresh!
Rose Facial Spray, Grace + Stella – Another Birchbox item, this spray came in last month’s Birchbox and became a firm favourite quickly. I use this whenever I feel like I need a bit of calm back (normally at the end of a particularly stressful meeting!)
Neom Calm & Relax candle – Also on my desk, is this most divinely-scented Neom candle. To be honest, I don’t even light it very often, but what I do like to do is pick it up and smell it throughout my day, as I genuinely find the scent to be super restorative and calming.
Hey, Portal!
The final adjustment I have made to my WFH setup is to set up a Facebook Portal on my desk to enable me to easily have video calls during my work day.
Not only does this free up processing power from my laptop (an important consideration when you’re essentially running video calls all day), but it also frees up my screen real estate from having to position my call and other tabs + windows. This makes running my work days 10x easier.
Lastly, the Notes feature is great! You can write yourself little notes that ‘pin’ to the Portal display. I only have one right now (see above) but its an important message to see throughout my day!
That just about covers the most important things on my desk setup! I’m sure I’ll continue to iterate on it in my everlasting quest to make it as comfy as possible.
Questions? Comments? Please leave your thoughts on this post!
