Home Office Reboot: Describe Your Office Setup

This post was written for Organize IT by Howard Yermish. He is an internet marketing strategist and is obsessed with finding ways to use technology to make people and business more productive. In this post he describes how he rebooted his office to make way for a more focused work environment. It should hopefully give you an insight into the thought processes involved in streamlining and simplifying, whether it be your office, your home or your personal life. Share your own office reboot experiences in the comments!

Thanks to the current economic conditions, I recently found myself back in my home office and it was time to reboot my career as well as the office. So I had an interesting opportunity to start from scratch.

Home Office in another home
I have young children in my house. As disciplined as I am, the kids are incredibly cute and they want to play with me. So I setup in my mother’s basement. It is very close by and it gives me the feeling of going to work. The house is quiet during the day and the rent is very cheap. The first step with it was to simply clean out everything. And I mean everything. Similar to preparing for a move, I embraced the mantra; keep, throw away, donate, or store. I decided exactly where the desk should go in the room and then put my computer in the perfect place. No printer, scanner or other peripherals, no books, papers or pictures. I grabbed a legal pad and a pen. As I worked the first day with my extremely spartan setup I made a list of the things that came up during the day that I felt I would need or wished I had.

The phone
At first I thought about just using my cell phone for business, but the math was bad. Long discussions with clients would eat through hundreds of minutes much too quickly. If I was going to sit in the same place every day why use up mobile minutes? Since I was already linked to the broadband internet connection via WiFi, I decided to give Skype a try. So for less than $100 for the year I had unlimited incoming and outgoing minutes and a phone number. That’s a lot cheaper than going up to the next plan on my cell phone or having a second line to the house!

Cheat sheet
Very quickly I found myself looking up the new information for people I talked to (what was my phone number again?) and since I was restarting my consulting practice, I didn’t quite have my talking points down to a science. So I took a single sheet of paper, wrote down the new phone numbers and a great version of my thirty second pitch in large letters and tacked it up on the wall.

Multi-function printer/fax/copier/scanner
At first I thought that I would need one of these right away and wrote it down the first day. But so far I haven’t needed it at all. The house computer has a printer, but my home office doesn’t. And in the last month, I haven’t yet needed to print anything for myself. Nothing. What I found was that when it wasn’t close at hand, I stopped needing to print. For agreements, documents start as PDF files and are emailed to the client for signature. I encourage clients to scan documents to a PDF and email it back to me or digitally sign the document. If this doesn’t work, I ask them to put the documents in the mail. Simple. As for inbound paper, I try to get it captured digitally, filed into an appropriate reference folder, recycled or shredded. I make sure to move fast on this. Paper collects infinitely and every new sheet makes the reduction of the pile just a bit harder.

The power of a timer
Time can be slippery. What may start as a quick email check becomes an hour of wasted time. Whether the timer is a computer desktop widget or a simple kitchen timer, it doesn’t matter. If it is time to check email, set the timer for five or ten minutes to read and reply. Do the same with RSS, Facebook or Twitter. When starting any given task, I decide how much time it should take and set the timer for the appropriate duration. What I have found is that the act of setting the timer keeps the task more focused. When the timer goes off, I can renegotiate the amount of time required for the task. Time devoted to something is a deliberate decision rather than haphazard and unplanned.

Rethinking the tickler file
One of the things that always bothered me about David Allen’s GTD method was the tickler system. It simply didn’t work for me in the digital world. And because I try to use as little paper as possible I found that there wasn’t much in a lo-fi tickler file. After checking it and finding very little of importance there each day, I stopped checking and then ultimately stopped trusting it. As a result I’ve changed my tickler system into the following hybrid.

• Inbox: stuff to be processed
• Now: stuff happening now or to-do today
• On deck: ready to do, could be today, but definitely by tomorrow
• Deferred: an action to do, but not due today or tomorrow
• Waiting for: needs someone or something else to be done first
• Someday: not a priority now, but reviewed regularly for initiatives

All incoming stuff goes into the inbox and standard GTD methods apply. When processing the inbox, stuff goes into On deck, Deferred, Waiting for or Someday. When processing something to Deferred I simply write the due date on it. Nothing goes directly into Now. Once you are done processing you grab the top thing on the Now pile and do it (don’t forget to set the timer). Once everything from that basket is finished, move everything in the On deck basket into the Now basket and put the few things in an appropriate order. In the same organizational moment, review the Deferred basket and move anything relevant to the On deck basket. Something that is truly on fire gets resolved right away (two minute rule). It obviously does not need storage, so it doesn’t affect other bits in the system.

Setting the stage
I don’t have visitors to my home office so it might seem a little bit strange, but I like to setup the office so that it would be ready in the event of any visitors. For example, I have a stack of business cards in a card holder. I have pictures of my wife and kids. I have desk toys to fiddle with while on the phone. I have appropriate office supplies at hand. I even have a small cube fridge (like what I had in my college dorm) and single-cup coffee maker (like K-Cup, Senseo, or Tassimo). I also purchased some healthy (and not so healthy) single-serve snacks to have on-hand. The act of going to the kitchen for a minute can turn into a huge distraction. One month in After a little over a month at work in the new home office, I’m glad that I took the reboot approach. At first it felt radical, but it has translated into an increased focus on work and overall productivity. And the new office environment is actually supporting those key GTD habits that can sometimes be so elusive.