Blinded by what we know: The search for the home office.
A fews weeks ago I was visiting friends and family in Colorado. My buddy and I went on a beautiful hike in the foothills just outside of Denver. He and his wife are two of my closest friends and we all had dinner together. After a few drinks and a raging game of Yahtzee a spark of curiosity came through me and I asked to see where my buddy had set up his home office. He warned me that he hates it. We walked into the basement and there in the corner sat a small table with a steel chair padded with a throw pillow. What had started out as a couple months from working from home had now turned into the long haul. Our ability to adapt is really amazing but adapting does not necessarily equate to us doing our most productive work.
Before we get into this I want to offer up some of my office cred. It’s like street cred but for the office. I spent several years working with Herman Miller as a Design Consultant. A large part of my job involved facilitating human-centered design sessions with company employees, interior designers and real estate people. Sometimes I would spend hours in a workplace observing people’s behavior. It sounds creepy but they knew I was there. More recently I collaborated with both Herman Miller and Steelcase on their marketing materials for their office products. Both Herman Miller and Steelcase are legends when it comes to researching our behavior as it pertains to work in the office. They have pulled together some great resources located on their websites that are helpful for getting started with a home office.
In my experience it is best to start by understanding yourself and the type of work you do. This is not a sponsored post and I am no longer employed by them but Herman Miller did put together a great assessment tool to help assess your current home office situation.
The tool is great but does not provide much direction if you currently hate your office situation or have not even found one yet. The home can be tricky to identify a place to work especially if this is something new. We tend to find ourselves viewing our environments through the lens we always have. The likely reason for this is because we use non-verbal cognitions called schemas to organize the world around us including our environments. Schemas are shortcuts for our brains to make sense of situations. They develop while we are children and continue to develop and strengthen as adults. Schemas fuel our Confirmation Bias and help us create order in a world full of ambiguity. However, this can be detrimental when we are attempting to view our home with a new perspective in search of a place to work.
Back to my friend’s home office. We walked through the rooms in their house and discussed how they were being used. They had two guest bedrooms, one of which was the location of his current home office in the basement. We talked about the possibility of him moving upstairs. He said he would love to but looked to his wife to get a pulse on her thoughts. Her office has always been at home and she has to take phone calls regularly for her job. This could be identified as a schema that applies to both a social and environmental shortcut.
The social dynamics of a relationship is not what this post is about. I can imagine a lot of people have found themselves cohabitating and working together at their homes for the first time. I really admire the way these two talked through it while I was there. Which leads me to my only suggestion around this is to talk it out. Find out what each other’s concerns are and address them. There are likely little compromises you both can make to create the ideal work environment for both of you.
My friend was very excited about the potential to have nice natural light in his new found office location but even though the environment has desirable attributes we still walked into a bedroom. I suggested that he remove the bed and try to commit to this space being his office for now. The reason for this is because even though we might consciously be telling ourselves this is our new office space the bed in the room is acting as what psychologists call a prime. A prime reminds us of the schemas. “This is where Brad sleeps. That bed looks comfy. Why are we working here? Why can’t I go back to the office? etc.”. Instead of trying to consciously convince your unconsciousness that this is now an office. (I don’t think that is even possible.) Create a new environment by removing items (primes) that are associated with the old schema that will create space for you to develop a new schema around doing your best work.
In summary, we have a specific way of viewing our environments to make sense of our lives. This is normal. We commit spaces to being a guest bedroom, the living room or the kitchen. Try to remove the pressure of these associations by considering that your priority right now is to find a place to work. You are a professional and deserve to have a space to put out your best work! Commit a space to the best of your ability to be recognized as a place to do work. It’s more important to understand that schemas might be in play than trying to identify a specific schema that might be happening while looking for a place to work at home. Consider reaching out to a friend or even me if you need some help in seeing your space with a new lens.
The follow-up to this will be for the people where it is impossible to have a dedicated space or prefer to move throughout the day.