I work from home, which is a 450 square foot studio apartment in midtown Manhattan. I don’t want to live in my office. I want my home to be a home. That said, it’s important for me to maintain a work area that is minimal, tidy and unobtrusive in relation to the rest of my precious living space. Cleanliness should be a priority for all office environments, both personal and commercial. In terms of the latter, you may want to click here to learn about Commercial Office Cleaning if you have an office that is in need of cleaning services. A smartly appointed corner is what I’m willing to sacrifice in the name of work real estate in my humble home, so luckily this is all I need to clean and maintain rather than a whole office space.
At the beginning of this month, I moved to a new apartment in the same building. (It’s actually the same apartment, just on a lower floor.) Which has prompted me to stock up on supplies for the office. As with every move I’ve made over the years, the move gave me another opportunity to reinvent a little and pare down my already austere lifestyle even further. The moving process has a way of forcing you to examine just how much pointless, unused and unnecessary junk you actually have. Over the past few weeks, I’ve filled numerous large garbage bags, sold several items on Craigslist, made many donation trips over to Housing Works, and I still have more to unload. Another big part of the pare-down is my ongoing process of eliminating paper, which has so far enabled me to downgrade from two file cabinets down to just one.
I’m not a fan of putting technology center stage in the home. Since 2007, my “mothership” of work machines has been a Mac Pro tower with a 23″ monitor, which commanded a lot of focus in the room. Over the past few years, with business shifting from web design to the blog, the nature of my work has enabled me to slim down to three key tools: my MacBook Pro laptop, my iPad and my iPhone. I sold the 23″ monitor and repurposed the MacPro tower as media server with all my music, movies and photos. It’s now essentially an iTunes jukebox and iPhoto library, wirelessly accessible from my laptop, iPad and iPhone on my secure home network. The entire setup is wirelessly backed up at home via Time Machine and to the cloud via Backblaze.
As a result, I’ve got a lean and efficient home office that will nicely blend in with the rest of the apartment, without looking like a design hiccup that doesn’t belong in the room.
Now I just have to finish the rest of the apartment…
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