What’s the most important design element in working from home?

Mental and physical work can take multiple forms.  Mental work is doing the book keeping for your business or some other “knowledge-“ type work or maybe even thinking creatively to solve some sort of problem or just because.  Physical work ranges from exercise to the laundry to adding a room onto your home to many other things that, for the faint of heart among us, lead us to sweat just thinking about them.

The single most important thing that the design of a place where you’ll be doing any sort of work needs to do is signal to you that work is not only planned, but imminent.  Silent signals sent by spaces are, for the many, individual.  If since you started grade 1, a terribly scary looking stuffed owl has watched you from the corner of your desk as you’ve worked, give that owl a quick dust and make sure it’s sitting on the corner of your desk.  If you’ve always been motivated to work out more vigorously by seeing yourself in a mirror as you toil away, make sure that your exercise area has a conveniently placed mirror.  All this is a lot like making sure you have the right Zoom backdrop, except those Zoom backdrops are seen by other people.

If you’re doing knowledge work, it’s probably a better bet to keep your workplace looking, at least roughly, like a workplace.  Research has shown that people do a better job in a work area that looks more like a traditional workplace than one that looks more like a Tuscan garden, for example.  We learn all sorts of ecological rules about what cues in our world mean and the ones that signal “time to do mental work” are particularly important.  These are the same sorts of childhood learned cues that cause us to be quiet in libraries, for example.  We learn place-related rules young.