195 Lighting & Furniture for Accounting Firms

I've been looking forward to this one. Today we're talking lighting. We're talking furniture. Like the thing you're sitting in. Plants and all the other goodies in your office and how they impact the way you work, how productive you are. Your mood has a big impact. Come on in. Okay. Okay, let's go. All right, up first, office chairs. A lot of people saying they're excited for this specifically. It's a hard thing for me to have super helpful input on. I can share my experience. Office seating in my. In my experience, is just so person to person. So personalized bodies are different, preferences are different, and it's hard to get to something that feels like kind of an ultimate answer. I can share some of my experience. I just use what most people would call gaming chairs now for. For primarily the reason that they are much more firm generally than the old style, just super plushy office chair. And I much prefer that firmness. There's a level of perkiness. It feels like you're sitting on something instead of sitting in something. And when I'm sitting all day long, I don't really want to, like, squish way down into a thing. So the chair I use is called Secret Lab Titan Evo. We can put a link to it in the show notes. If you haven't already figured this out this week, you. Yes, it's a nice chair. Okay. And it might be more than you're willing to spend on a chair. They have, like, a light version of this. But shouldn't we be investing in the thing that we're glued to 12 hours a day? Feel like there's a lot of those things in our life, like your mattress and your monitor, and eventually it's just every single thing is like, well, you spend 36 hours a day using this thing. But a chair's probably important, man. Especially if you got back issues. One thing with this chair, it has a big size, too. If you take a helpful tidbit out of here, be aware of what size person a chair is. Optimized chairs are not going to adequately support people who are everywhere from five feet tall to six six. So I'm about six three. And this chair has, like, a large size. And so I'm. I've always been used to sitting in office chairs that just felt a little too small for me. And this one, if anything, is a little bit too big for me. But that's one of the things that made me like it, I think, is it didn't have, I don't know, some of the problems I've run into with other smaller chairs. So a few thoughts on seating here from Andrew Huberman's podcast. So Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist from Stanford. He has a podcast called Huberman Lab. It's. It was like top 10 global podcasts all last year. And he shares a lot of science based, think boy kind of stuff. When it comes to your furniture and your lighting and all that, you're optimizing for alertness. So there are things that you can do that will get your body to a more alert state, or ultimately your productivity is gonna be a product of your level of alertness when it comes to chairs. Forward leaning enables alertness in general. Back slouching posture does not. It does the opposite. One thing I really like about this chair is it can get me into like a real kind of perky, I don't know, supported kind of forward posture. Like more so than I can get any of my cars to do, which is kind of annoying. Cars these days feel kind of optimized for being slouchy. This chair can get me forward. That promotes alertness. Interestingly, not so much chair related, a little bit chair related. An upward gaze promotes alertness. So the actual ideal position through the lens of alertness for your monitor is actually a bit above eye level. Downward does the opposite. Promotes restfulness, which is not what I want in the middle of a workday. In terms of brands of chairs, I don't know, there's a gajillion of them. I mean, Herman Miller's always been sort of the, the premium one. If you're gonna go on the premium end of the spectrum, one thing to look out for is actually really good deals on used premium chairs. Herman Millers, for example, most of them come with 12 year warranties, so they're made to last a long time. I bought several Herman Miller Aeron chairs off Craigslist for 200, 300 bucks. So oftentimes you can get chairs that have been used just for a few years. They're at less than half the price if you're going to the premium end of the spectrum. If it's a cheap chair, then that thing's probably blown a tire by that point. It's hard to make sense of this stuff on Amazon. Amazon increasingly is just a lot of fake reviews. But I still don't know that it is better than that local commercial furniture place where like the markups, I mean, I had clients who did that stuff and their markups were astronomical. I have a hard time believing that that place is ultimately going to be a better or more cost effective solution. Where I think those are really valuable is like you got a big old building or new construction or something like that, and you just need a whole bunch of different things, them coming in and doing a lot of that legwork for you. If you're going in and buying a chair, I don't know that ultimately you're going to get like a better deal on a chair at a place like that. I mentioned warranties with Herman Miller. Keep an eye out for warranties. They matter not only for the eventuality that you may have to replace something, but also as a signal to the overall build quality of a chair. The chair doesn't have any kind of warranty at all. To me, that's a signal that there may not be a high degree of trust or that company may not be around to stay. A couple other traps I had jotted down. Many gaming chairs are really bad. Much like we talked about headsets and how gaming headsets are like marked up really cheap hardware. Some gaming chairs, that is also the case. This is where roundups can be really helpful. There's a I'll put a roundup from Wired down in the in the show notes. They're super helpful for cutting through the noise and not being able to tell one chair from from the other. One other trap I had here, aesthetics. How a chair looks. In my experience, when we would like buy chairs for the team, oftentimes people were just picking chairs based on aesthetics. It does matter. It's not to say it doesn't matter, but when you're sitting down, you can't even see your chair. So don't optimize for aesthetics necessarily. When I talk gaming chairs, there's you can get gaming chairs that look totally like normal, like an offshore. Like I can get a version of this chair that is all black and black stitching and all that stuff and it just looks more or less like an office chair. So while there are super garish gaming chairs, bright colors and all that, you can also get ones that look totally normal. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant Staffing. Y' all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on because you know what, the folks we hired offshore, really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms, you know, offshore outside the U.S. you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself, figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start. Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple at accounting firm in the US Hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked to some of the vendors that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened through things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. Today's episode gang. It's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Did you know Live Flow has over 100 spreadsheet templates that anyone can just go out and swipe these templates. They've built out in Google sheets for all sorts of things. I'm looking at it right now. We got a, we got a four week rolling cash flow forecast, a 13 week cash flow forecast board reporting template, break even analysis template, Budget V Actuals, Consolidated AP Dashboard, Business KPI dashboard. All this stuff you can just go swipe on the Live Flow website. Literally just copy the template and if you want, you can just make use of those. But here's the problem. Those spreadsheets, they're not just gonna magically update with the information from the accounting software, right? You're gonna have to go, you gotta go look over there, you gotta get the thing, you gotta bring it over there next month, you got to do the same thing. Something changes, you got to do it again. So if you want, yeah, go swipe those spreadsheets and spend the rest of your days keying in figures manually or swipe the spreadsheet. Get started with Live Flow, which will automatically sync from QuickBooks Online that data into those templates. Works with the templates they'll give you. It works with, frankly, any old spreadsheet you use, you already got one that you love. You can make it smart by connecting into QuickBooks. They rolled out a bunch of stuff in the last year from budgeting. You can sync budgets in from qbo. Big thing they did a couple months back was launch consolidations. So you can roll up groupings in like a visual way, whether those different companies have the same chart of accounts or not. So if you're ready to make some big brain auto updating spreadsheets or even if you just want to swipe some templates, get a taste of what it's all about, check out Live Flow and the link in the show notes. Okay, lighting. This is probably the biggest thing we'll cover today. A lot of stuff from Huberman. Because lights impact our brain big time. So particularly early in the day, bright overhead lights, like, trigger your circadian, circadian rhythm and like get that body going, triggering alertness. And it's because we have receptors in the bottom of our eyes that pick up the overhead light light coming, that's coming from above to wake you up and get you as alert as you can be. So with this in mind, like, overhead lighting in an office is totally fine. But a big thing here is most offices aren't bright enough. So OSHA actually says offices should be lit to around 500 lux. Factories and workshops, 750 lux. Andrew Huberman says basically, go as bright as you can go safely, especially early in the day. The brighter it is, the more it's going to drive alertness. Being mindful of stuff like, you know, retina sensitivity, which is going to be different for different people. If you are worried about it being too bright, just remember it's still much brighter outside. Even in the Pacific Northwest, where I am on a cloudy day, it's generally going to be much brighter outside where you wouldn't wear sunglasses or anything like that than it is in the office. Light meters that measure lux really cheap. I'll put a link to the one that I've got in the show notes. 30 bucks off Amazon. Just a little plastic thing that measures the light level. Look out for patchiness in your light, the distribution of light throughout an office. Everything that you see right now might be very light, but where you are may actually not be very light. Especially if you got a hodgepodge of ceiling lights. Like, they don't always necessarily do a good job of even evenly lighting a room. Put those blue blockers away. Absolutely no reason to have them early in the day unless you are, like, predisposed to really have serious eye strain issues that will actually prevent that circadian rhythm from getting going. Because evolutionarily we got out of bed, rolled out of the cave, and saw a whole lot of blue light. Like, that's just kind of how we're wired at this point. Most people have phased out fluorescent lights. But be mindful of lights like that that will flicker. Even if that flicker is imperceptible to you, it can cause additional eye strain and for some folks, headaches and migraines. My mind always goes to the movie Joe vs. The Volcano, where Tom Hanks is sitting down in his dark little office with like flickering fluorescent lights overhead and he's just like, he's just totally bugging out. That's such a good movie. That holds up so well. Joe versus the Volcano. Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan. If you're looking for a fun date night movie, get it. Joe versus the Vodka. It's so good. Now that's the right answer for throughout most of the day, but later in the day, ideally what you want is the light, like positioning coming down throughout the day. So brightness coming down, but also the position of the light. So overhead lights late in the day can actually mess with your body's triggering of, you know, serotonin and stuff like that. That makes you sleepy. Because historically overhead lighting, that was, you know, sun. So generally you want lights coming lower if possible, throughout later in the day, getting into mid to late afternoon and evening and generally getting warmer if possible. So for example, that could look like overhead lights during the day. It could mean a couple floor lamps. Like late afternoon could mean desk lamps later in the day. Like, think of how you can get that lighting positioning lower if you're only using those, those floor and desk lamps later in the day, then you could put a warmer bulb in there. Want to go really fancy? You know, something like the Philips hue bulbs. You can set them to automatically go warmer later in the day. Just be mindful of what is in your field of view because it has a really big impact on alertness and kind of your body's rhythm throughout the day. One big thing I wanted to call out that has a really big impact on mood and alertness is getting some natural sun on your skin, especially first thing in the morning. So even if it's overcast outside, getting just that Little bit of sun, even five minutes makes a really big difference. So I try to first thing in the morning, spend five minutes outside. And that like jump starts your body circadian rhythm, awesome mood boosting effects. If you have like a, a morning routine or morning coffee or something like that, think about a way to build getting some natural sunlight into your process or your routine once it is light outside. Unfortunately I'm getting up too early these days and it's not light yet. So color temperature. Early in the day you want something more blue like 5000 kelvin. Later in the day, ideally a little warmer is best. One other thing folks oftentimes don't pay attention to with lights because it can come at the cost of energy efficiency, is your light's CRI rating. So a CRI rating is a light's ability to reflect the true colors of an object. And so natural light, sunlight has a CRI rating of 100. That's as good as it gets. But many, especially the super early super energy efficient bulbs have CRI ratings as low as 50 or 60. And if you have two different lights and you shine them at, you know, the same apple, a CRI light of 100 will make the colors much more vibrant and look very different on that apple compared to a CRI rated bulb of, you know, 60. And it's why you go outside things are so bright and so vivid and oftentimes indoors things can feel more kind of dingy. And CRI kind of got thrown out, out the window as people made the move to LED lights and super energy efficient lights. Because historically CRI was really low on energy efficient lighting. And in the context of like photography and video production stuff like I do, I can't use any lights in shooting video that have a CRI CRI CRI rating under like 98. It has a really big impact on how colors pop and stuff like that in video. So anytime I'm, I'm shooting something, I have all low CRI lights turned off. This is one of the big drivers of like what makes professional lighting really expensive and stuff like that when you're on movie sets and that sort of thing. But it also impacts the lighting that you have in an office. So there's going to be some cost trade offs there, but it also can super change the mood and the vibe in a room. And if the energy efficiency trade off is you're burning another a hundred bucks a year to have, you know, a much more brighter, colorful space to be in, that might be a trade off worth making. Now you can also hack all of this if you need to work late. So in a perfect world, like your body's into that rhythm and it's not changing day to day, but stuff happens, work happens. Maybe you got to do a late night. You can also, like think of all of these variables and where light is in your vision and the temperature of light and all that stuff. You can also hack all of that stuff to extend a day. If you got to go later. Just try not to make a habit of it. One other thought on lighting is control. So you can get bulbs with like built in WI fi where every single light bulb connects to WI fi stuff like Philips hue bulbs. Those lights generally come with a lot of flexibility on color temperature. You can even set up, you know, schedules throughout the day. So the reality is putting this stuff on autopilot is probably the only way that it actually happens every day if you do go to this level of effort. But a great quality of life improvement for even just dumb old lights is a little wifi wall plug. So it's just a little brick that goes into a wall outlet and that brick itself will connect to WI fi and you can set it to cut power and all that at certain times of the day. That. That's really nice. I've got a number of those around that are set on a schedule for things that are not otherwise smart. A couple quick things on plants, real plants, great if you can keep them alive. CO2 levels in an office are a very real thing and oftentimes at a higher level than is optimal for people's brains doing work. I'll put a link in the show notes to the CO2 monitor that I have in my office. Uh, they're cheaper ones. I got a little bit nicer one because some of the cheap ones have reviews about the ratings not being consistent or not correct. But a huge percentage of offices have CO2 basically part per million numbers that are too high. So for reference, if you pick up one of those things, if you have over a thousand parts per million, most folks will begin to feel drowsiness. If you have over 2000 parts per million, folks will generally get headaches and feel sleepy. Ideally you want to get down like around, you know, 500. And so it's been interesting watching this in different areas of our house. I'll put the monitor upstairs where both me and my wife and the kids are bumping around in the evening. And it can very quickly go from 500 to 1200 in a period of a few hours when there's a bunch of people bumping around and in that not very small space, but in close proximity to each other. My office actually is pretty good. And it's because I basically work in a garage and it is very drafty, so I get a lot of natural air in here. But many office environments don't have good enough ventilation. And so those CO2 levels go up and it is making your entire team be zombies like it. It actually has a really significant impact on your ability to focus and be productive. So again, I'll put a link to CO2 monitor in the show. Notes. I assume plants help with that. I haven't actually tested that. Real plants, if you can keep them alive, totally a win. It's funny, I feel like five or 10 years ago, like people just started packing plants into every nook and cranny of fancy offices. I personally like it. I think part of it is the aesthetic that offices are so like angular. And I do like cool, modern Y kind of offices that are inherently very, you know, a lot of straight lines and very angular. And plants serve to kind of break that up. Don't forget about your desk. We talked about desks being too big in terms of things to put on your desk. I personally like little desk plants, but it's also about like, how do I make the office a place that I would personally enjoy? So like, if you enjoy spending time in nature, bring nature things into the office. If you enjoy fish, like get a little fish tank. Anything that can boost your mood or make that office feel like it is something that's yours, you know? This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up could source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xeroqbo and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Hmm. Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team up. Other odds and ends on furniture surfaces around the office for like mid level lighting. So like a little side table where they call them little buffet, stuff like that that you could put like a desk lamp on. This is often overlooked in cool lighting setups. People you know are thinking more than ever about what they look like on on video. And most cool lighting setups have like little accent lighting in the background and need some sort of little desk or side table for that. And they're good for just like making putting little, you know, kind of talking point things on it. Like what are you interested in? You're into golfing. Can you put a golf thing on that little table? Stuff like that. Please don't do the the I'm super bored of the giant bookcase video background that's flat to the relative to the camera. You know, it's just like straight back behind them. Like that was. It was actually funny in Covid when like all the news anchors and stuff were going remote. There's just like this bog standard white bookcase and people would just stuff every book that they own up onto there and it's like, yeah, let's find something more interesting than that. Now the best tip I can give folks easy ways to make your video look more interesting is just to add depth and to add layers to the background. So usually the worst thing you can do is have your camera perpendicular to the back wall where it's just going to be a straight back wall. Looking back into a corner or looking along the length of a wall is generally going to be much more interesting because it's going to add some depth there. Also if you can have several layers of depth behind you, for example, like a table that's not all the way against the back wall or like a plant that is sort of midway there. If you look at the way people set up shots and movies and in documentaries and stuff like that, usually in the background, you're going to have several layers of depth to create kind of some Visual interest there. The worst thing you can have is just this single plane running straight across the back. And you know, augmenting that with books or a couple of pictures, like, I don't know, that's not super interesting to me. The most, the most memorable video setups to me are the things that like are very unique to that person and kind of show off something about them and their interests. Something keeps beeping in here. If you're hearing beeping, I don't even know what it is and I can't find it. Anyways, that's my hot take on giant bookshelves temperature regulation. According to a study in July 2006, the highest productivity temperature that an office can be is 71.6 degrees. I don't really know what that means or how personalized it is. I can tell you I have worked in a number of offices that are beyond the range of what's normal. And that was not pleasant nor productive. Back in the early days of the last firm I was, when I was just a staff accountant, we moved to a new building and, and one of the offices, we remodeled it before we moved in. And there was a big office that got split in two and I got the little office that was kind of carved out of a bigger office and it didn't have any sort of like return or heating or cooling or anything like that in that side, like in that space. And it was, there was a floor to ceiling window there from the 80s in a really small space. The peak that it got to in that office was, I think it was 90.6 was the hottest day. And back then I'm wearing button up shirts and like slacks every day. It was unpleasant, it was not pleasant. I was put there because quote, I was the only one who wouldn't complain. And it was true. They were right. Company man through and through. And then later on in the same building, I had an office downstairs that got freezing cold. It was like low. Like I could see my breath at times. And somebody on the team bought me fingerless gloves because my hands would literally like start seizing up from typing all day. But it being so cold, generally they actually say 69 to 72 is like the best window. But I think there's probably some personalization there. Other, other seating in the office. Always just make sure that your chair is higher than anybody else's chair. So if they come to sit across the desk from you, they're looking up to you. Let's not forget whose office this is after all. And then accent lighting and I'm not talking about like streamer kitty RGB lighting where you've just got like a EDM festival going on in the background. You're sophisticated accountant. But accent lighting I think is like pretty cool, like warm lighting behind a bookshelf or even as simple as a desk lamp on a table. It can add like a lot of kind of depth and visual interest to what is otherwise just kind of a flat static room. I know most people these days are just like working in a sea of beige and just big old creamy flat walls with nothing on them unless you hang up a flat picture frame. And so how do you add kind of depth and texture? You may have noticed in some of my videos, oftentimes there's like a shaft of light, like angled going across the background. That's actually like a studio spotlight sort of thing that creates very angular lights rather than having an object to fill the frame on that side. And it's really easy for me to use a light to kind of fill the frame on that side and just create like this sort of angular different shade on the background. So lighting beyond functional lighting. I think that's interesting too and something that you can set up on like timers and that sort of thing. Oh, one thing I didn't touch on that sort of kicked off last year was these sort of lights that sit on your monitor. So BenQ has one that I know is popular, but it's like it almost sits on top of your monitor like a webcam would and it shines the light down on your desk. Something to consider what, what it's nice for is the light doesn't get in your eyes, but it brightens up the desk below you. So especially late in the day when you want your positioning of the lights coming lower, ideally turning on that, that light that is above your monitor but illuminates your desk below you, gives you some helpful functional light for later in the day without actually like blaring lights into your eyeballs. So it is good for that. What do you got? What did we miss? What's your favorite thing in your office? I would love to hear what that is. Is it your desk? Is it your monitor? Is it that little tchotchke that has some sort of personal significance for you? I love finding cool little things like that little sticky cord holder thing. Heard from a bunch of people that they bought that. Sorry about that. It was six bucks. Could be worse. If you got something you really like, drop it in the comments. This was a fun little series we did. You got any questions? Drop those in the comments as well. We'll do a Q and A tomorrow. And thanks for coming and hanging this week.