Sacred Space

When I first started working from home, I put a folding chair next to a small desk, plugged in my laptop, and sat down to work. I was in a room that my wife and I called the office, but it was like a disorganized storage space. I didn’t make any changes to it as I didn’t think that a home office needed anything special. I figured that working from home was just a simple location change and that I could work anywhere in the house.

But working from that room felt different, and I didn’t understand why. Some of it was obvious: the chair was uncomfortable, the table felt shaky and too low. But other aspects I couldn’t explain: I just felt like I couldn’t concentrate. My kids or a knock at the front door would interrupt me, and I would feel relieved that, finally, I had an excuse for not making any progress. After the interruption, I would sit back down and get back to not working. My mind would wander frequently; I couldn’t focus.

One day, I found myself reading the entire Wikipedia page for the Swedish group Ace of Base [1]. How the heck did that happen? These were the steps that lead me there:

  1. I was working on an important and hard problem.
  2. I recognized how hard the problem was, and being unable to make progress didn’t make me feel good. I wanted something to take my mind off the problem, maybe let my unconscious mind solve it, or I felt like I deserved a break.
  3. I had unrestricted Internet access on my work computer, and I opened it without a plan.
  4. A few minutes later, I was watching a “babies laughing compilation” video.
  5. The soundtrack of one of those videos was Miami Sound Machine.
  6. I googled “going to get you” to remember the name of Gloria Estefan’s hit “Rhythm is Gonna Get Ya”.
  7. The 3rd result was Ace of Base’s hit “All that She Wants” because this phrase is in its chorus, although this song’s subject matter is quite different.
  8. This reminded me of “Ace of Base”, and I wondered if they were still making music. Another google search leads me to their extensive Wikipedia page. I was fascinated to learn why Linn’s face was blurred on the album cover for Flowers and Cruel Summer.

Meanwhile, my big hard problem remained unsolved. I distracted myself. Nobody walked into the room and shouted: I need to immediately know what Swedish Pop Group influenced Katy Perry, Robyn, and Beck!. This massive shift in focus happened in a few minutes and is only one example of the sort of distractions that were derailing my work and killing my motivation.

A large part of solving this problem is establishing a separate physical work area within your home with its own rules. This area needs to operate differently from the rest of the house so that you feel that are you are at work when you enter it.

Building a Proper Workplace

To build a workplace in your home, we first need to think through what makes an external workplace function. In a traditional dull office space, every detail: spacing of the desk layout, lighting, ambient temperature, and noise levels were designed and optimized for one thing: working. Printers, paper clips, spare computer monitors, desks, chairs, and whiteboards were easy to find. Things like places to nap, Greco-Roman wrestle, or play electric guitar were harder to find. They built the space for work, and this energy carries you on a gentle little wave of momentum that encouraged you to get stuff done because there wasn’t much else to do.

Even technology companies that provide envious in-office perks do so to keep employees on-site and working hard. Google and Facebook provide massages, nap pods, on-site laundry, artisanal candy shops, and nerf-gun ammo stations because they think more work gets done with these perks. These items make it more pleasant to stay at the office until 10 PM and less miserable to work late or on Saturday.

You should establish a place optimized for work, just like companies do. When you step into a shop or workspace, how can you tell? The space has a few common characteristics:

  • A sense of respect is communicated by the care to keep the area clean, functional, and ready for use.
  • Required tools are close-by and in working order.
  • General pleasantness that prevents you from becoming discouraged or bored.
  • A consistent physical environment, especially with regards to noise and visual distractions.

Once, while consulting for a large Fortune 100 company, I discovered a post-it note on my desk telling me that I should keep my cubicle desk less cluttered. I learned that a team of people were responsible for wandering the building, I assume under cover of darkness, to encourage people to keep their space clean by reminding them in passive-aggressive condescending language. That felt that it was important for the office to be clean and not look like it was possible to lose anything, as their core mission was delivering packages and not losing any. I saved all the post-it notes, thus creating an ironic mess in my top drawer. You have caused the very thing you were hoping to prevent, office cleanliness task force.

When you work from home, the rules are more straightforward, and there is no desk law enforcement. But you should figure out your mission and create a space that matches it. The room you choose to work in might need some redecorating. Your office is a serious place, but it should be a place that you want to spend time; it should be highly functional but pleasant. When you look up from your computer, you should like what you see. Put up some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle posters. Have toys, write something on your wall, or paint a mural on it. Buy some posters with cheesy motivational saying or just pictures of grilled cheese sandwiches or non-cheese items. Have something that you want to look at. Change it as often as you like.

We underestimate the care taken in the design of typical office furniture. The sad gray cubicle walls and generic black adjustable chairs might seem uniform and boring, but they are grey because it hides dirt, and those highly-adjustable generic chairs were built so that no matter how your size or shape, you can correctly dial the chair into a good comfortable position. As part of taking your home office build-out seriously, you might need to pay for a good chair and understand some basic ergonomics to properly configure your chair height, monitor height, keyboard, and lighting. There are many good resources out there to help you adjust, but the basics are that a good chair works wonders, and you should try to have your eye-line match the top of your monitor [2]. Don’t be afraid to spend a little money here as repetitive use injuries are no joke, and it isn’t as straightforward that they are work-related injuries outside the office.

Given how standard video conferencing tools are now, your office should also appear professional. You might get your best work done with a mannequin standing behind you looking over your shoulder while you wear a cowboy hat, but it might be asking a bit much of your co-workers to ignore this visual during video chats. The balance you are trying to strike is that your office needs to be your office and arranged as you desire, but also appear much like a traditional and perhaps predictable office setup. Great options include a wall, whiteboard, or bookcase behind you. Imagine that the CEO of your company requests to video conference at a moment’s notice: what do you scramble to hide from sight? Keep the pieces of your office seen on video looking this way all the time. You want to be able to answer any video call at a moment’s notice and give the impression that the caller has dialed into a smooth-running, highly efficient productivity cave.

For most workers, office space needs to be quiet to reduce distractions. What keeps a good office distraction-free is this excellent device called a door. Ideally, your door locks, and there wouldn’t be a need for anyone to come into the room during a typical workday, and more preferably, the door would be steel and the walls soundproofed.

That said, not everyone needs a quiet office to work; some people prefer working near a window where they can look onto a busy street, while others like the noisy chaos of coffee shops and kitchens. When you work from home, nobody else chooses if your workspace is in a noisy hallway, across from the breakroom, or library-quiet. Choose for yourself a setup that matches your tolerance or need for small distractions.

Create a Separate Mental Space

More important than how your office looks, how quiet it is, or how it is decorated is how you treat your time there. If you respect it and act professionally, then it creates a clear boundary between your work life and your home life. A meaningful way to show respect to your workspace is with your willingness to remove anything that can distract you from your work.

We live in a time where it is much easier to get distracted. Facebook and company are multi-billion dollar businesses engineered to distract you from your work. You will be pulled into their tractor beam or someone else’s; what do you do when this happens?

There are two ways to remove distractions from your digital life:

  1. Put up defenses so that you can’t access the distractions.
  2. Put up no defenses, but track what you do and reflect on the results often.

The simplest method is to bar yourself from access to the distraction physically: disable or limit Internet access on your work computer for a period. This is the equivalent of putting a lock on your fridge after dinner when dieting. There are many ways to install obstacles on your computer, including Focus [3], amongst others that allow you to add sites to blacklists, whitelists, and timed lists. This allows you to set up rules like “I get 15 minutes on Twitter and YouTube a weekday between 8 and 5”. These tools are useful in stopping mindless browsing when you are bored or discouraged.

Another approach is to install something that tells you how you spend your time. RescueTime [4] and others watch how you use your computer and network and use this information to provide you with a report on how you spend your time.

Some of the tools are crude; they tell you in five-minute intervals what program was the primary window at the time of the sample, while some are more sophisticated and can tell you that you accessed Twitter 20 times in a weekday, adding up to two hours on Twitter.

To use these tools effectively, you need to configure them to fit your working style. I work best on creative things in the morning but can get distracted during that same time frame. I don’t allow myself to browse specific sites that I know can distract me from my essential tasks in the morning. In the afternoon, I open my access during my regular lunch break and limit my overall time to a set number of minutes per day. For example, my Twitter usage is limited to ten minutes a day. This rule allows me to follow links from work-related sites that might reference Twitter or check-in and flag something to read later from professional contacts while preventing me from longer distractions that could derail my momentum.

Twitter is on this 10-minute timeout system, but I ban for life other sites like Reddit, The New York Times, and Velonews. There is no reason to use a work computer to keep up to date with current events during the day. If I need to find out who is leading in a Tour de France stage, then I can step away and find out from another computer elsewhere in my home, and then come back.

I came up with this system after installing a tool that showed me what I was doing. The results of this experiment showed me that when I was the most energetic and ready for great work, I’d find logs of me spending 45 minutes wandering around Reddit like an idiot. In the afternoon, I’m not tempted as much to browse around news sites or current sites like social media, but can be distracted by longer articles more easily. To properly come up with a system that works for you, pretend that you don’t have your current job but instead are the IT Manager for your home office. What sites would not be allowed within the company’s network? What business purpose would Facebook or Twitter serve?

We so often leave our computers open to all forms of distraction and entertainment when it is good to close a window, batten down the hatches, and get work done.

Don’t Do List

Besides limiting time wasted on computers, you also have to establish hard boundaries around what you are not going to do during work. It helps your muscle memory when a space is always used for the same purpose.

Establish a don’t do list to limit activities that you should only do off-hours:

  • Snacking
  • Playing video games
  • Watching movies
  • Jumping on your neighbor’s trampoline
  • Drinking alcohol

You might be thinking that this seems immature; of course, you aren’t going to drink beer at work. What sane person would do this? A person who has worked from home for five years (or five months) might do this. They could do this after completing something particularly difficult, during a stressful time, or just out of habit when they are in a good mood. They are used to doing this at home, so it might not seem as odd as it truly is.

While alcohol is an extreme example, the same idea applies to more boring actions. Don’t eat at your desk. Don’t take a personal call at your desk. You need to get up and move away, or when you watch an episode of your favorite Netflix show during lunch, you shouldn’t do it on your work computer in your office. Train your body and mind that while you are in that space at that time that you are working, period.

Then over time, your workspace becomes a place where you naturally avoid distractions because your attitude about the space should be that it is sacred: deserving of respect. Think of yourself as a baseball player. When you step up to home plate, when you put your feet into the batter’s box, it means that it is time to try to hit the ball. During that time, you will not pause and check Facebook for scores from other games or wander back to the dugout to eat a snack because you have “earned it” after making it halfway through the at-bat.

This might mean that there are times where you are working from home and are not in the right mindset to work and need to step away from your sacred space rather than disrespect it by watching YouTube, Internet cat videos, or paying bills online. When the time comes to take a break, or you are tempted to get distracted, you need to have a plan in place for what not to do.

You aren’t the only one that should treat your office with respect. When I let my kids come into my office, they have to make something. They can do their homework, work on an art project, or write a story, but they can’t come in and eat a snack or lounge around. If they draw something, I put it up on one of the walls (which is now completely covered with art and stories that they have made). This place’s energy is not the energy of procrastination or sloth; this is where work gets done.

Creating a home office requires building a physical space that works while at the same time creating a mental space in which to work while avoiding distractions. Next, we look at other mindset factors to be aware of to work from home effectively.