There are a few things that will make your office space a much more welcoming environment. Working from home full time or as a side earning project is brilliant, but it does mean we need to pay particular attention to what is surrounding us. It should be somewhere that hypes you up for the day, where your creativity and productivity are maximized. So what can you do to make sure you’re getting the most from it? Let’s take a look

Firstly make sure you space is clean, and not just ‘dusted the shelves a bit’ clean, but calling some commercial cleaners and get the job done correctly.

Add some green to it. Having plants in your working vicinity is proven to make you more productive. While you might be tempted to assume it’s just for aesthetics, it isn’t. Having them in your office space will help reduce stress, the green color also has a relaxing and calming effect. They help keep your air clean too. They suck up all the carbon dioxide that we don’t need and turn it into oxygen. They also clean up some other chemicals in the air, making our space a much more pleasant area to be in.

Get organized. While it might be tempting to keep putting off paperwork organization – don’t. Carve out some space in your week to make sure you get it done. Pick up some folders, some labels and get it all in good order. Then, take the same care of the folders on your desktop or laptop. Pick up a hard disk drive with plenty of space and any folders on your computer that are more than a year old and unlikely to be recalled soon put them all on the HDD. While we never know when individual files will have a use in the future if you have a high client retention rate the chances are you might need them again – so keep them.

Get a pin board with a whiteboard attachment, and use it every morning. When you get up each morning write your to-do list on it. Write the time of day you want to finish your work and make that list a priority. Anything that you haven’t completed by the end of the day is not likely to be significant so put it in the Weekend Bucket.

Get yourself a Weekend Bucket – While it is lovely to have time off whenever you like, some jobs need to tackle more than you need to binge-watch Scrubs. Your Weekend Bucket will be filled with tasks that require attention but aren’t of the utmost importance. You can take your time and work through them slowly. By taking them off of your to-do list but making sure they are tackled their mental stress load becomes a lot less.

Clean out your desk drawers. Any lonely pen lids, rubbish, notes that make no sense now, bits of junk – take out and reclaim the space for notebooks, pens with caps and things that you use on a daily basis.