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Your goals when setting up an office in your home are: maximize efficiency and productivity, maximize comfort, minimize disruption and create a professional image.

Your first step is to figure out what area of the house will be set aside for the home office. Ideally, you have a spacious spare bedroom you can use.

Even more ideal would be a bedroom on the other side of the house from the one in which you sleep, so you can achieve some degree of separation of business and home life.

Since you may be spending a great deal of time in the home office, choosing a room with a nice window or a pretty view is a good idea.

If you don’t have a spare room, you may have to set up the office in one of the living areas.

If so, at least try to locate the office in a quiet corner away from high traffic areas, so you will be able to concentrate on your work. It seldom works well to have an, in effect,
mobile home office, such as setting up at the dining room table in the morning and packing everything up in the afternoon (so your family can have dinner!).

It’s much too difficult to keep all your papers and files organized. The other issue is disruption to your work efforts by other members of the household.

Suppose you want to work in the evenings. You don’t want to locate your office space too close to where family members are watching TV.

Kids and dogs can be an impediment to creating a professional image in your home office. If you are on the phone with a client, and that person can hear children yelling or dogs barking, it can detract from the image you are trying to create.

You may need to have a talk with the kids about not interrupting you when you are in your home office, or you could close the door to the office and put a “do not disturb” sign up when you are conferring with customers.

These days, office furniture is so inexpensive, and available at most discount stores, that you can create the workspace you need without busting your budget.

And home based businesses are becoming so pervasive that some new homes come with a home office all set up, including built in desks, work spaces or bookshelves.

Chairs, couches or other seating areas in your office should be comfortable.

Remember, you’re the CEO now. You get to set up the office the way you want. You can paint the walls any color that makes you feel most productive.

No need to duplicate the sterile industrial cubicle you may have been cooped up in at a corporate job. In fact, you might even want to invite your dog or cat to keep you company while you are working. Even a fish tank can help ward off that feeling of being all alone, especially if you are used to an office environment where you interact with lots of other people.
However, some productivity tools you may have learned in the past need to be carried over to your new home office.

Set up a filing system right from Day 1. Make sure you have plenty of filing space. Having to wade through stacks of paper to find a key document is a time and productivity waster
Make sure you have adequate work space so you can spread papers out as you are working and quickly find everything you need for a given task.

If your work area is too cramped, you will gradually feel more and more frustrated.

Having a separate phone line for your home office is a good idea, with its own answering machine that tells the caller the name of the company they have reached.

Again, the idea is to separate your home office from the rest of the household’s activities.

Don’t be afraid to check out used office equipment. Companies go out of business all the time and you may be able to find perfectly good, nearly new computers, fax machines, scanners, copiers for a fraction of the retail price.