The desk for your home office should be considered an integral part of your home as well as an integral part of your body. If you have a home office, chances are you spend many hours sitting at your desk. In another 50 years, the desk will probably truly become an extension of the human form in one way or another. Until then, your purchase of a home office desk needs to take several elements into consideration.
You should make sure your home office desk is large enough to situate everything you need on a daily basis to get your work done. This usually is going to be mean a computer, but computers vary widely in size. If you are using a laptop computer, you can get by with a smaller desk than if you were using a desktop computer. Other things to take into consideration are whether you consult books often or not. Do you need space on the desk for incoming and outgoing forms or papers? Should the desk be large enough that you can place a calendar blotter over it and can you utilize that calendar blotter efficiently without having to move this, that or the other around or completely off the desk.
Consider whether you need a desk with drawers or a built-in file cabinet or built-in shelving. Today’s home office work desks come with just about every necessity built-in, but don’t buy a desk that comes with a lot of shelving if you really don’t need it. A drawer can often be underutilized because it becomes merely another place in the house to collect junk. Make sure that you are going to really use that desk drawer for further your work efficiency. If not, you can get by without your desk containing a drawer.
Lighting should be an element you take into consideration when buying a desk for your home office. If you are going to use a single light fixture for illumination, do this little trick: measure 15 inches to the left of your work center and measure a foot to the rear of your work center. That spot behind you is the ideal place for a single light fixture to shine light on your home office work desk. If you are using a lamp with a lampshade, try changing to a more opaque shade to reduce wear and tear on your eyes. An opaque shade allows a little more light to pass through and that will provide a better situation for viewing and ease up the discomfort you start to feel in your eyes after a few hours at your home office workplace.
Consider painting the walls that are visible while you sit at your home office work desk a cool, gentle color. Pale pastel paint colors creates a relaxed and comforting mood that keeps you distracted from other tasks and allows you to better focus. When choosing a desk, therefore, be sure that you buy a desk that allows you to take full advantage of the colorization of your home office walls. Integration of the desk into the interior décor of your home office is a vital element to making sure that your home office production remains steady.
If you know that you will be using the desk for other activities, look for a home office work desk that is ideal for those particular activities. For instance, if lunch inside your home office means sitting at your desk while you eat, look for a desk with a long peninsular design that you set aside just for eating. This will keep you from getting the food all into your work area. If you will be using your desk for two different types of work, look for a home office desk that can be separated into two different sections so that you can use one part of it for one job and the other for the other job.
Finally, always test out the desk while sitting in a chair that at least closely resembles your work chair. A desk that fit your perfectly inside the store may wind up being too low or too high for comfort when you get home and use your actual office chair.
