Blurring the boundaries between work and play, office and home, most of us have had our daily routines, commutes, and, quite frankly, whole lives thrown off-kilter in the last year. We've spent large parts of the day cooped up inside our houses, and although it’s been enjoyable for some, we think it’s important to reclaim your home as an enjoyable, comfortable, and relaxing space, so we’ve put together a few ways you can take back your home.
Organisation
If your dining table has become your desk and your sofa doubles as an office chair, it can be difficult to switch off at the end of the day and mentally seperate work and pleasure. In other words, going from workday to chill out time in the same location is confusing. Usually we can associate the office with work, and our home with relaxing, so if you’re merging both locations into one, it’s understandable that our brains struggle to differentiate. Making an effort to ‘transform’ your home into an office during the day, and a comfortable environment in the evening is important. When it comes to 5pm, don’t leave your laptop, to-do lists and work-related paraphernalia strewn across the table. Create an area to store your work things and put them away each evening. By reducing reminders of them and physically removing them from the space, you’ll be more inclined to relax and focus on other, home-related things.
Our Wooden Pegboard provides a perfect space for storing items and keeping them out of the way. Place your books, notepads, pens and stationery on the changeable shelves, or hang things off the wooden pegs.
Our Wooden Pegboard is perfect for arranging belongings on the shelves and wooden pegs.
Create a commute
The humble commute is rarely celebrated and usually considered a stressful waste of time for most. However, the mental effects of the physical journey from home to work have become much more apparent since the shift to WFH due to Covid in early 2020. Maintaining a routine and giving your brain a period of adjustment from a home to work mentality is important for productivity, and something some of us have forgotten to do while working from home.
Before you begin the workday, why not recreate a commute? Head out the door for a five, 10 or 15 minute walk, and mentally prepare to begin working as soon as you get home. Not only will it provide you some good old fresh air and exercise, the time to readjust your mentality will work wonders for establishing the right mindset and ultimately increase productivity. It’s a good idea to take a pen and a Field Journal with you in case you have some great ideas while you’re out the house too.
The George & Willy Field Journal, for notes on the go.
Keep on track
When working from home, it's easy to become distracted by household tasks, like cleaning the kitchen, repotting a plant, or hanging the washing out (we’ll come to that later). Jot down your tasks for the day on something easily visible, including the jobs you’ll do during the work day, and the jobs you’ll do once you’ve clocked off. By writing them down and making them easily visible, you’ll feel more focused on completing the tasks and much more inclined to get them done.
Our Daily Roller is a brilliant tool for jotting down lists, making notes, or doodling designs, perfectly sized for intimate spaces. For a bigger version, take a look at our Studio Roller, which is great for workplace planning, and available in four different sizes. Both products are designed to seamlessly dispense kraft paper and they’re refillable, so you can tear the completed lists off each day and start afresh tomorrow.
The Studio Roller comes in four different sizes. Additional paper rolls can be purchased here if you run out.
Making room
Physical space equals brain space. By creating physical space and reducing visual clutter within your home, you can reduce clutter in your mind too, and ultimately pay more attention to the important tasks at hand. Our Hanging Drying Rack was designed for exactly this purpose. We wanted to remove the bulky and cumbersome presence of a clothes horse taking up valuable floor space, so we created a roof-mounted clothes dryer that could be lifted up and lowered using a pulley system. Hang your clothes on the pulley maid, lift them up to ceiling height and they’ll be out of the way and out of sight - simple!
The Hanging Drying Rack keeps clothes out of the way while they dry.