Whatever they say about the benefits of working from home, it has many disadvantages for certain types of people, which I’ve already experienced. You lack live communication, often work overtime, and what I’ve noticed, you may also face a psychological barrier while trying to get in a mood to do your job. As a person who has his life segmented, I experience a cognitive dissonance when its different parts mix together. Because of not always having a possibility to spend working days in a café or on the beach somewhere in Thailand, I tried walking around my house for half an hour after the breakfast to trick my brains, since it worked for Orhan Pamuk, as far as I know. However, you cannot say you arrive home and find yourself in an all-about-work environment. It is interesting, especially considering the fact that many people would love to work in an office with a home atmosphere, including myself.

The solution looks pretty simple – you just have to make a home office (By a home office I do not mean something like these examples of home museums that do not seem to be designed for active use). The question is, whether it would be as suitable for work as an actual office, and whether it is worth the effort. I wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about spending time on something I cannot accurately evaluate the potential results of, however I managed to get some positive results.

Actually, I have found out that you are able to distance yourself from a homely atmosphere by creating a sub-space in your own house. The process can be really exciting, especially if you do not draw inspiration from those Pinterest images with an elusive hipster spirit in them. It made me recall how I built shelters in my childhood and it helped me to imagine myself visiting different worlds.  

I have found out that even if you do not succeed in creating a proper working atmosphere at home, there are still incontestable “pluses” in taking up the challenge.

Creating a working station also has a positive impact on your home in
general. If being performed properly, the process includes throwing away
your old clothes, eating leftovers, finding so many missing things and
reconsidering their purpose. Then you get enough energy even for
arranging your notebook entries, cleaning up your beloved Mac, or whatever else you use for work – both figuratively (I mean apps, like the one I have linked to), and literally as well. After such an adventure that can last for several hours, you feel like you are freed from the burdens and even have more space for new ideas, since artistic confusion is not always good for inspiration.

Secondly, you can finally learn to take care of living creatures and green the planet at the same. Fortunately, there are also plants that are very easy to take care of, so you do not have to spend much time on watering, fertilizing the soil or replanting and yet they will remain alive. For example, it could be a Shamrock plant that needs watering about once per week, orany knind of air plants, which don't need soil and can be hung in midair. The latter are even more hardy and just require dunking into the water for a couple of hours every ten days or so.

Worth mentioning, you can also educate yourself on indoor lighting and color issues. It sounds obvious, that illuminance and colors affect people's mood and, as a result, their productivity, yet in our everyday life we often ignore this fact. Thanks to studies you can actually correct your working schedule and even begin to work outdoors more often.

The experiment is not over, gonna keep on redesigning my room, which is not that time-consuming as I thought. Hope the results will not be long in coming. New ideas already find the way to my mind more easily, and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

My first blog post will be rather about the psychiatry of architecture and design. I have recently become interested in the history of antipsychotic drug development. While reading, I have caught myself thinking that not only the treatment methods have changed, but also the vision of how mental... View full entry