Where should I work from?

A simple shift that changed my entire experience of work.

The new landscape of work is liberating. And, at times, paralysing.

If I can work from anywhere, where should I work?

It is the school holidays here right now. I look around the house and almost every space irritates me. There is mess and clutter. A box I asked the kids to take to the recycling a few days ago.

The pile of books waiting to be read teetering on the coffee table. If only I had more time. If only I had more energy to do the things I really wanted to do when the workday was done.

Our home workspaces are almost certainly going to fall short of the perfectly lit and styled images in magazines. Yet, that doesn’t stop us from careering down a path of space inadequacy no matter how unrealistic those images are.

Have you ever noticed the perfectly placed Mac screen in the dream home office photo spread has no cables attached to it?

Because cables are ugly no matter how many zip ties you bind them with.

Not everyone has a home space set up to make work easy or effective. Before you berate yourself over feeling uninspired by the white melamine desk that feels as awkward as an ironing board, the effect our workspace has on us isn’t just in our imaginations. The physical environments where we work have a significant influence on everything from our thinking, our moods, our physical health, and our productivity.

Aside from not having to commute, and being able to arrange work and the rest of our lives more easily, fewer distractions and more control over our working days are among the top reasons why we like working from home. Listening to your office colleague munch their way through granola at 9 am every day, or someone in your team regaling the office with excruciating details of their weekend is not exactly fun.

But working from home can have challenges too.

The neighbour who starts mowing their lawn or playing the saxophone right when you start that important Zoom meeting. Pre-pandemic, the design of our homes had largely moved away from a separate office (with actual walls and a door that could be closed). The rising cost of real estate and smaller houses has meant that a separate office was often a trade-off. A study nook (or desk built-in against the wall in a corridor) has become the norm.

Never mind a study nook, many people suddenly forced to work from home had no designated workplace at all. In early 2020, social media was full of pictures of makeshift work arrangements on kitchen tables, laptops perched on upturned laundry baskets, and in one case a particularly tall guy using the top of his fridge as a stand-up desk.

Some of us took to our lounges or beds and asked whether this was a viable option.

While Churchill often worked from bed (and held cabinet meetings there), for most of us it’s not a workable or particularly productive option. Don’t get me wrong, on days when my kids were homeschooling during Covid and the dog was barking at a seemingly invisible enemy, working from bed seemed very appealing. Or just crawling under the covers and pretending that the entire situation wasn’t happening.

I would also find myself daydreaming of the workspaces of people like Neil Gaiman, who often books himself into a hotel to get a novel finished. Gaiman also has a gazebo at the bottom of his beautiful garden that he meanders off to each morning - coffee, fountain pens, and Leuchtturm notebooks in hand.

Imagine, I would think, after what seemed like the fifteenth garbage truck of the day, of becoming one of the writers and digital nomads who work from exotic villas in the jungle or cottages by the sea.

But before you feel overly depressed by these unrelatable examples, let’s not forget that Stephen King wrote Carrie in his laundry room.

And some of history’s greatest philosophers have shared our WFH struggles. In a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, Franz Kafka wrote "time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

So how do we create a workspace at home that actually works? A simple shift I took made a surprising difference.