Items You Need to Set Up an Efficient Home Office

Now that many of us must work from home, it is imperative to invest in the right equipment. Our old kitchen table and improvised dining chairs won’t help us achieve the productivity we desire.

Fortunately, with the right gadgets, furniture, and tech tools, you can make your home workspace as inspiring and productive as your standard office space, perhaps even more so.

Here is a list of items that will inspire you and help you make smart choices.

1. Ergonomic Chair

Home seating chairs like your sofa and living room chairs are for relaxation and not for work. If you keep using them for work, you’ll soon start feeling some discomfort in your back.

An ergonomic chair is a common item in most well-furnished offices. But unless you work at home normally, you probably haven’t got one.

This chair has an adjustable height and backrest. It also has wheels that allow you to move around and reach for items conveniently.

If you need to sit all day at your home office desk, invest in an ergonomic chair design to improve your body posture and avoid back pain.

2. Standing Desk

While it is essential to use a comfortable chair at your desk, sitting for long hours is not good for your health. Sitting all day increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

A standing desk allows you to work comfortably while standing. You may also adjust it to alternate between standing and sitting.

Standing desks offer you these benefits:

* Reduced back pain

* Improved productivity

* Higher energy levels

* Multiple health benefits.

3. Computer

A PC is an essential home office tool, performing numerous tasks including data and graphics processing that simply wouldn’t be possible without it.

However, the choice of a home office computer can be a tricky one. The options can be overwhelming.

Should you buy a desktop, laptop, or all-in-one? Do you get a wireless or wired keyboard or mouse? What do all the tech specs mean, and which brand should you buy?

Here are some tips for choosing a powerful PC for your home office. For graphics, video, or photo processing tasks, choose a machine with at least:

* 2.4Mhz processor CPU

* 8GB of RAM

* 500GB of local storage space

For quick load times, a 250GB solid-state drive will be ideal and reasonably cost-effective. If you must buy a portal machine, ensure that your laptop has a battery that can last for 8 hours.

4. Monitor

A lot of your work gets done with your eyes. So even if you have the best chair, desk, and PC, you still need an excellent monitor to boost your productivity.

Focus on size, resolution, capacity for adjustment when choosing a new monitor.

Today, you should consider buying a monitor with a wide-screen design that can receive multiple inputs from different sources or those that can display multiple windows in a wide format. The extra screen real estate will reduce the amount of time you spend on tasks that require you to use different applications at the same time.

5. Printer

Home office printers can serve multiple needs. They will print work documents quickly and allow your kids to print their homework, vacation pictures, birthday invitations, or home craft projects.

While you don’t need a large office printer, if your business requires many pages to be printed daily, a versatile laser printer can deliver excellent and cost-effective results (for more information please visit Ink Station). Your ideal printer should also have wireless connectivity enabling printing from all devices in your home, from your laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

6. Productivity Timer

Productivity requires focus and a consistent flow of work. If you work at home, you will have to fight many distractions from your environment and your kitchen.

To help you stay focused during business hours, use a Pomodoro timer. A good example is the TimeFlip 2 timer.

This timer can schedule concise work sessions of about 30 minutes. And then alert you when you should have a short rest before you resume another work session.

The timer connects to an app that allows you to analyze and improve your performance as you work.

7. Noise Cancelling Headphones

Another gadget for shutting out distractions at home is a pair of noise-canceling headphones (or earbuds). They work well when you have to cut off any unnecessary noises and concentrate on the task at hand.

If you do many mentally demanding tasks like writing and editing, you should definitely invest in a pair of wireless earbuds, which are even more impressive, considering their size. Modern noise-canceling air buds allow you to use your finger to adjust the volume just by tapping them. It’s also easy to let in the ambient noise come through when you need to hear what your loved ones are saying.

You can make calls without removing them, and they can pause the music you are listening to automatically when you take them off.

8. Camera-Mic-Speaker Combo

Virtual meetings will be part of your weekly work schedule. These meetings require you to communicate and share your thoughts verbally.

However, the ambient noise in your home can easily bleed into your conversation. You don’t want your co-workers to hear the sound of your kids, dog, cat, or parrot.

That’s why you need a mic that can recognize unnecessary sounds and block them out. A good example is the Poly Studio P15 that creates an acoustic fence around you as you speak.

9. Digital Scratch Pad

Writing or drawing with traditional pen and paper is still quite inspiring. But these days, we spend more time with digital gadgets (phones and laptops) than with good old pencil and paper.

Using a Rocketbook allows you to use a surface and a lightpen to create digital notes each time you receive an inspiring idea. The app linked to the device allows you to save all your notes online on Google Drive or Dropbox. You can also transfer them directly to Evernote.

Remote working will be with us for some time to come. The items listed above can make your workplace more comfortable and boost your productivity. Review this list again and see which one of these items will make your work that much easier to complete and become an integral part of your working day.