Six Key Questions to Ask When Setting Up Your Home Office

Your home office should be designed to accommodate your business while having as little impact as possible on your home life, and vice versa. As someone who has worked from home for over 20 years, I can attest that keeping work and home separate is easier said than done.
Setting up a home office can be as simple as having a computer and telephone in a tiny cubby under a stairway. However, it’s preferable that your home office provide a place where you can conduct business transactions in a professional manner – away from the noise and distractions of the household.
After all, your home office is a direct reflection of your business professionalism, and needs to be considered carefully when planning your business.
The photo above shows my home office from the exterior. You can see that my space is above the garage, which is a separate building from the main house. This is an ideal situation for me because business visitors don’t enter my house.
But not everybody has the opportunity to have their home office in a separate building. To make the most of the space you have, ask yourself these six key questions:
1. Will clients be visiting your establishment?
Making sure your office is situated away from the personal flow of your home and family goes a long way in presenting a professional image. Ideally, your office should be located in an area separate from the rest of your house. But if this is not possible, try to find a quiet area of your house such as the basement or spare bedroom as far away from the busy part of the house as possible.
Above all, don’t set your computer up on the dining room table with a television blaring in the background. I can’t stress this enough: to be taken seriously as a business owner you must present a professional image at all times.
2. Will you be manufacturing your product on site?
If your business requires noisy tools or smelly chemicals for production, you will definitely want to locate this area away from living quarters. A detached garage or outbuilding would be perfect for keeping the manufacturing aspects of your business separate from the public access areas. You may want to have a small desk with a telephone and maybe a computer available close by, but most of your paperwork should be in a safe, off-site location.

3. What equipment will you need?
The type of small business you operate determines your equipment needs. At a minimum, you’ll need a desk, computer, telephone, filing cabinets and a good, comfortable chair. If you manufacture a product, you’ll need the equipment associated with those processes. And don’t forget about storage. A place to put everything often becomes a headache for home office workers.
4. What safety factors do you need to consider?
Safety should always take precedence when setting up a workplace, and your home office is no exception. Remember, you are going to be spending lots of time in that space, so you owe it to yourself to create a safe and healthy workplace.
Proper lighting and ventilation add not only comfort, but security as well. Make sure all lighting fixtures and electrical outlets meet fire and safety codes. One of the best investments you can make as an initial start-up cost is to have an experienced electrician assess your workspace and have enough electrical outlets installed so you do not have to run equipment with extension cords. This not only reduces the risk of fire, it will also provide more efficient operation of your business machines.
In addition, make sure there is adequate ventilation and airflow. This reduces the risk of allergies and illness from stagnant, mouldy air.
5. How will you ensure health, safety and comfort?
Ergonomically correct workspaces can reduce the risk of aches, pain and repetitive action injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. For example, a comfortable, ergonomic chair can make the hours you spend in front of your computer a lot less taxing on your muscles. Keyboards designed to promote proper wrist placement can be worth their weight in gold. Monitor filters and wrist pads can reduce strain on tired eyes and arms – offering a little respite when your research requires hours of computer time.
6. Have you made provisions for data backup?
Since data is so much easier to backup than it is to recover, do yourself a favor and implement an automatic computer backup procedure. Ideally, you should back-up your files daily – and all backup data should be stored off site in case of burglary or fire. Take a minute to think how long it would take you to re-coup your records should the unthinkable happen. Then weigh that out against the time it takes to backup your work. You can bet that backing up your data will win hands down every time.
Probably the easiest way to backup your data is to subscribe to an online service such as XDrive or iBackup. Another method is to have a separate external hard drive such as the Iomega external hard drive with automatic backup software (that’s the method I use). One downside of the external hard drive method, however, is that your data is not stored off site.

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