How to Audit Your Work From Home Environment to Optimize Your Health

If you’re like 22 million Americans in the modern workforce, you work from home. Since the pandemic shifted our work environment as we knew it, working from home, at least partially, seems to be here to stay.

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We figured out many of the major hurdles and best practices early on in the pandemic, but is this permanent way of working as good for us as we want it to be? It can be, but we must give new attention to our work from home set up for it to actually be optimal for our health and productivity. Here are our favorite ways to best optimize your work from home experience.

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Clear Your Space to Clear Your Head

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The state of your space is a mirror of the state of your brain. If you want a clear, focused mindset, prioritize those qualities in your surroundings. Some believe that disordered environments increase creativity, but a study found that clutter and distracting stimuli can contribute to inefficiency. With your workspace steps from the rest of your life, your desk has likely acquired random trinkets, family member’s belongings, and stacks of Post-It notes along the way. It’s easy for our space to get cluttered, but it’s imperative that it is as organized as you would be if you were to go into an office. Just because your colleagues can’t see your space anymore, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it look and feel great. Get in as much natural light as you can, add live plants to bring in some more life, and put those loose papers and supplies away into drawers. Out of sight, out of mind. Now, wait to see that shift in your mood and focus.

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Find Your Flow In Your Routines

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In 2023, researchers found that instability in work schedules can be associated with psychological distress, unhappiness, and poor sleep quality. Now more than ever before, there isn’t a hard start and stop to your work day, which means that creating a set schedule isn’t just good for time management — it’s also good for your well-being. Make sure to distinguish your work hours from your home hours and maybe even give yourself a ritual or quick walk to help with the transition. If you’re currently on back to back Zoom calls for 8 hours every day, we encourage you to take an honest look at every one of those minutes to determine if it’s all necessary. Can you slim your 1 hour meetings into 45 minutes or turn some of those virtual meetings into emails? If you’re online after dinner anyway, how can you leverage that asynchronous collaboration to work for you, not against you? Soon, you’ll be increasing your efficiency and decreasing your work hours.

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Set Boundaries, Prevent Burnout

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If your slack message alerts or washing machine jingle cause you to feel overstimulated, you may need to set better boundaries with the devices in your home — all of them. Just because the dishwasher can tell you when it’s job is complete doesn’t mean it should. Distinguishing the lines between work and personal life is not easy, but letting the two blur can be damaging to both. If you’re working from a home office, only bring necessary devices into the space and manage your notifications so you don’t suffer from alert fatigue. By minimizing the presence of technology, you’re also minimizing the chance for distractions. Use device features like screen time limits for apps or leave your phone in another room for an hour of focus time. We also encourage you to set similar boundaries with people living in the home to ensure you accomplish what you need to every day, free of too much distraction and overstimulation.

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Sitting is the New Smoking

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Let’s be honest, the ability to jump into work the moment you wake up can make it hard to even think about exercise. Despite the potential struggle to put your well-being before work, your habits can impact on your health more than you realize. According to a study from the Stanford Center on Longevity, the work from home trend has led to two more hours per day spent sitting. This increased sedentary behavior isn’t just impacting obesity rates — it’s also associated with increased cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. To combat this, consider taking your afternoon client call while strolling through your neighborhood or maybe it’s time to invest in that standing desk you’ve been eyeing.

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By taking a step back to audit your space and habits at home, you can significantly improve your productivity, attention span, and benefit all parts of your life.

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