MBA946 How To Have a Productive Home Office

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you business insights you can use right now with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. You know, in business there's nothing worse than launching a product that you've worked on so hard only to discover that nobody wants to buy it. This is why idea validation is so important. You need to make sure you nail your business idea, your product or service and make sure people actually want what you're creating, what you're offering. This is why we created our five Steps to Idea Validation course. This is a seven part video course with a workbook and this is going to walk you through how to make sure you create something your marketplace needs. Enrolling for this course is absolutely free. Just go to 100 MBA net just pop in your name and email address and the course is yours. In today's episode, you will learn how to have a productive home office if you work from home. Like many of us, whether it's part time or full time from home, you need to make sure the space where you work is conducive to making sure you get things done. If you're not intentional about creating a productive space at home, you you're easily going to be distracted and you're not going to get as much done. I find this incredibly important. Many people say I have to get an office or I have to go to a co working space or a cafe so I can work because there's just too many distractions at home. Well, that's probably because they haven't really made the Effort to create a productive space. And that's what you're going to learn today, how to create a productive space at home as your home office to make sure you're focused and you get things done. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Full disclosure. I work from home. Nicole and I have tried different setups when it comes to working for our business. We've worked from home, we've worked in co working spaces, we worked in cafes, we even rented our own private office. And we gave each one a good fair amount of time to see if this is a good fit for us. And in fact, at the end of the day, we went back to working at home. Now, there's a lot of reasons that I'll explain today, but one of the major reasons is that when you work from home, you are in full control of your space. You can really cultivate a great space to work out of. In fact, when we were looking for a place to live and we chose a place where we live now, one of the first things we looked at is where are we going to work? Which room will we use as our home office? So I want to start out with that because you may need to do some rearranging in your house. You might have to change rooms a little bit. Maybe your current bedroom makes a better office than the office that you have now. And if you're working from home, you're probably going to be spending a whole lot more time in the office than the bedroom. You're awake a lot longer than you're sleeping. Let's get into some basic principles when it comes to building your productive space in your home. Number one, I highly recommend it's a closed off space, meaning that there's a door that you can close and it's in its own space, its own room. I know a lot of people that work with a desk in the living room or a table at the kitchen. But you know, that might work in the short term, but in the long term that's just not sustainable. It's just too much of a high traffic area. You're going to get interrupted and distracted or way too many times. Even if you live alone, there's too many distractions around you, whether it's the tv, whether it's, you know, the things in the kitchen, grabbing a bite, things like that. You need to be in full control. So a private room is best. Whether that's a bedroom or a room in your house, or even if you have to convert your garage or your basement, that really Works as long as you have its own sovereign space. Right. Number two, if you live with other people, having a door really helps because you can put a sign on the door that says do not disturb. Do you need to make sure that you are distraction free? And this goes for whether you're recording a podcast or if you're shooting a video. It doesn't matter. Even if you're just working on something, writing something, you do not need any interruptions. I find that you're incredibly productive when you have long periods of uninterrupted time. I know firsthand that I can get a lot done if I have a three hour stretch with zero interruptions. Like nobody's talking to me and I'm just focused on my task list and I'm just going through it. So the less interruptions, the better. The number three, what's in that space? Make sure that everything in that space helps you be productive. Anything that hurts you from production is not really a good idea to have in that space. So I like to make my space all business, all work, right? If I want to take a break, I need to step out of that space. But it's important to have that mental shift when I walk into my office at home, that this is a place of work. This is where things get done. So if I want to have a ping pong table, I'm going to put that somewhere else. I'm not going to put it in the office outside those doors. And that's a good thing because when you do take a break, you want to be able to stretch your legs, get up and, you know, do that thing. Whether that's play a game of ping pong or grab a cup of tea from the kitchen. I like to separate break from work. And that's why our home office is all business. Number four, sunlight. I know this sounds very rudimentary, but sunlight is so important for, for you to get energized. We chose the room with the biggest window in our house to make it our home office, because just being in the presence of sunlight and nature, it just subconsciously helps you be more productive. If you're in a room with no windows or, you know, very little sunlight, it doesn't really inspire you. There's something about being in close proximity of nature and the natural sunlight that makes you feel like things are going to be okay. When you're stressed out, it calms you down. All right, let's talk about your desk. Your actual desk where you work out of now, whether you use a standing desk or a You know, regular desk where you sit at your actual space, where you spend a lot of your time is really important. Now, I find it very helpful to have as little things as possible on your desk. I have to do, like, an inventory every month or so to make sure that I clear my desk of things I don't need. So I literally just have like my keyboard and my mouse and my monitor. And I hook up my laptop to project to that monitor. I have a boom ARM and a mic. Cause I use that for my webinars. And that's pretty much it. I have a notepad and a mug of pens. Anything else is just distraction or clutter. And clutter's not good. So clear out any clutter. Make sure you only have the essentials on your desk. You also want to have some space on your desk, you know, just so you can, you know, maybe put a mug of coffee next to you or use your notepad and write on it. If there's no space to actually put something on your desk, that's a problem. Now, I mentioned this before, standing desk, sitting desk, you know, and I've tried both, and I found a really good compromise. We have standing desks, but we have drafting stools. These are the chairs that really are up high. So if I do get tired from standing, I can sit on these drafting stools. And it has a back as well. And I can, you know, pound out a few emails or something like that sitting down. And my eyeline from my monitor is still good because the chair is so high. But most of the time you want to try to stay standing. And it keeps you alert, it keeps you active. That's just the compromise. That's just the solution I came up with. I don't like to stand the whole time. Sometimes it's easier for me to type long kind of articles or emails or things like that when I'm sitting down. Okay, what about your walls? You know, I know a lot of people that like physical wall calendars. I have a physical wall calendar from Best Self. And to be quite honest, I bought it, I put it up there, and I never used it. It's just that I'm not used to it. It's not something that I use. I actually am a very big digital calendar person. Everything I have is in Google Calendars, and that's where I check everything. And it's hard for me to have two calendars. It's hard for me to have a digital one and a physical one. So for me, the physical calendar experiment did not work. And that's okay, I tried it out. But for some people, they like a physical calendar. They like to actually map things out and see it right in front of them on their wall at all times. You know, a digital calendar, it's not there all the time. It's maybe hidden on a tab or you have to open it up. Having gone through the experiment, I kind of can see a physical calendar being good for long term goals. Meaning, you know, you're trying to accomplish something over a course of three months or something and you want to be able to track and make sure that you're on track. But in terms of a daily calendar, I feel like the digital one is just so much better. Google Calendars, you know, syncs with your phone, the calendar app in your phone is great. If I need to change something, edit something on the fly. If I'm out, it's easy. But for long term goals, I think maybe the physical calendar is a good idea. But you gotta say what works for you. That was kind of the result of my experience. Now if you shoot a lot of video for your website, for your business, it's a good idea to dedicate a wall for video. And Nicole and I do this in our office where we have a dedicated wall where we have a backdrop. On that wall, it's basically paper that we bought from a film store, A roll of paper that just covers the whole wall. And when we're doing a lot of shooting, we have all the lights kind of gathered together in a corner. We have a three point lighting kit along with a boom arm mic and all that kind of stuff. So that is kind of spread out through the room when we're filming. But there's no need to be dodging all these lights and mics when you're in the office, when you're not shooting. So we just kind of gather them up in a corner. But how do you know where to place them again when it's time to shoot? Well, easy. We actually get some gaff tape and tape where they are actually supposed to be. We mark them when they're actually set up when we're shooting. And that way when we have to put them back where they were, we know exactly where they were because we marked them with tape, right? So we just literally put tape on the carpet. So if you go into our office, you'll see little pieces of black tape on the carpet. And that's just to mark where everything goes. So when we do shoot, we can just take all the lights and place them right there and everything is set up perfectly.

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All right, I talked about clearing all clutter from your desk and your office, but where do you put all the stuff that you need? You know, you have electronics, you have hard drives, you have notebooks, you have all kinds of things that you kind of need on hand. This is where functional furniture comes into place. Nicole and I picked up this ottoman that has great storage inside of it. So we got it from ikea. It's kind of like a long bench and it opens up in half from the top and you store a whole bunch of stuff. So anything that's kind of deep storage, things I don't need on hand all the time, hard drives, cables, notebooks, markers, any of that kind of stuff that I don't need every single day, we just put it in there and it's plenty of storage. And then it closes and it's clutter free and we use the bench to sit down. So if we're having a meeting, we can use the bench to sit down and take a break from the chairs that we sit at our desk. So any kind of furniture that could double up as storage as well, that has drawers or things that you can kind of hide away, that's a great piece of furniture to have in your office. Again, I'm not a huge fan of any kind of distraction in your office, in your home office, whether that's a TV or video games, a pinball machine, whatever, I'm just not into that. I think that let's just get down to business, work hard, and then when we want to take a break, we step out of the office and do that outside. But when it's right in front of you all the time, I believe those things need to be outside the office. So when you do take a break, you go take a break and you do those things. But when it's in your office, you're just too tempted to take a break every five minutes. Hey, we're human. So, you know, get those distractions out of there. One exception though is music. You know, some people love music. It helps them kind of concentrate when they're working. There's all these great funky soundtracks on Spotify. There's one called Brain Food, I believe. So having a wireless or Bluetooth speaker is really great that you can just connect with your computer and play some music as you work throughout the day. Nicole, my co founder and wife, she's a big, big proponent of having some plants in every room. And plants do help you feel a little bit better. It brings oxygen to the room, it freshens things up, cleans the air. This is especially important if the room you have, it doesn't have a big window and doesn't look out to nature. Say, for example, you've converted your basement or garage. So plants really can help, even if they're small potbinds. Well, there you have it. If you work from home, take on these tips and start having more of a productive home office. Keep those distractions out, keep it clean and overall keep it convenient. We try to make it easy so you can step into the office and get to work right away. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love this podcast, let us know in an itunes rating and review. We would love to hear from you. Reread every single review. And when you leave a review, other people can read about what you think of the show and it helps grow our listenership. So thank you so much in advance for that. You're helping other people improve their business. That's it for me today, guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Working from home has a lot of advantages. You know, you have no commute, you don't really need to dress up for work. You save money on gas, you save money on an office space. You don't have to deal with any of the office politics, but you do need to realize you do work from home and you need to make it a point to make sure you do get out and you go for walks and you spend some time outside your house because you're living and you're working in the same space. So for the sake of your sanity, be conscious of that fact. Alright, that's it for me today, guys. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode where I talk about three stories you need to know by heart. These are stories that about you, about your business about what you do. And you're going to be asked about this over and over in life. And if you don't know this very well, you're not going to come off as a great communicator nor a great entrepreneur. People only know of us, of what we show them, so we need to show them that we know our stuff. So I'm going to lay out what three stories you should really have down pat because you're going to be telling these three stories throughout your life over and over and over. All right? You'll hear all about that in tomorrow's episode, which is free at Friday, and I'll check you then. Take care.

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