 How to set up a functional home office. Wouldn't it be great if you could get all your work done from the comfort of your own home? You know working from home is an ideal situation so you can become your own boss. That being said setting up an office in your house is a lot different than setting one up in a normal office setting. It's going to take a bit of planning to have the same productivity and efficiency you would get in a normal office setting. In this video I'm going to share with you exactly what you need to do to have a very productive and efficient home office. Hey I'm JR Fisher and I've been selling online since 2009. Long time and we sold millions of dollars in both digital and physical products. On this channel I share with you the tips, tricks and techniques that I've used to build a multi-million dollar company. Heck my products are sold on thousands of sites including Walmart. Before we get started make sure you subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there. Don't forget bell notifications when you hit that bell there. It'll make that sound kind of you'll see. And then I want you to turn on all notifications. On top of that for a limited time I have an e-commerce course that normally sells for 97 dollars that you can get absolutely free. There's a link in the description down there. Click that link and learn. Now do you currently have a home office or are you just starting out? Put your comments below and let me know what stage you are at in developing your home office or if you already have one and it works out share with us some of your good ideas. So it's really cool to have a home office but you are more susceptible to distractions and those distractions could really throw you off and worse than what you think. I would advise you setting up your home office where it's far removed from distractions like I think I want to put another load of laundry in or maybe I could watch that TV show real quick. Separate it from the rest of your house if at all possible. To make your office productive and efficient I'm going to give you the guide right now as to how you should set it up. When you go to set up your office let's give it some thought first. Let's think about the design of your home office. Do you want a fancy home office? Do you want a simple one? What are you actually going to use it for? Now this is my home office right here and I do videos. So I have a lot of lights set up all around here. I have a camera in front of me and it's designed for making videos more so than working on websites or doing anything like that. Ideally you don't want to spend a whole lot of money on your home office. The whole idea is to keep your expenses down. So I'm going to try to show you ways that you can cut some corners and save some money. Your home office should be more about getting things done than try to get into a designing magazine with some fancy office. Now I'm going to cover the basics of setting up your home office so that it's effective and productive but if you want to make it more fancy and do different types of designs you may want to look at Pinterest or Instagram and check out some of the pictures that are in there. Now first off does color matter? Well yes and no you may have certain colors that you feel more comfortable working in but according to a scientific research study the color green is the most calming and productive color that you can have for an office. Freshhome.com says that the color green is the most relaxing and easiest for strain on your eyes. For the most part when we're designing a home office space is going to be an issue so we want to consider what space you have and how to utilize it properly. Now I read a funny study the other day and it said that workers will spend about a week a year looking for misplaced papers or items that they don't know where they're at. Some solutions to this may be to set up some file folders somewhere where you can actually get to all the items that you need and they're organized in a fashion that they're simple to find. I personally don't like a lot of paper so I don't print a lot of stuff out. I keep most of everything that I need in files on my computer or online in an area like Dropbox. I guess the challenge is to figure out what works best for you. I know that if I have stuff online whether I'm on my phone or whether I'm on my computer or wherever I'm at I can get access to them and work anywhere I want and I like that idea so I don't like printing out papers and filing them and storing them and that type of thing. Now if you are going to print out papers and you are going to have files think about accessing them. Do you want to have them in file folders in your desk? Do you want to have them in a separate file someplace else? How often are you going to access that paperwork? If it's not going to be often maybe you can store all your paperwork and related items in a different part of the house. When you're thinking about building your home office think about building up instead of out so you may want to use stacking file folders that type of thing so you don't use up your floor space. Another simple trick is to get a paper shredder and have that paper shredder if you're the type person that prints stuff out have that underneath your desk. Don't wait to shred your paperwork do it immediately when you want to get rid of it. Now one advantage of having a home office is you can actually personalize it. If you want mementos of you know your family members or you know I wouldn't recommend putting those high school trophies out but whatever makes you happy what makes you comfortable makes you motivated to want to work is a great idea for a home office. You do want to be kind of careful about clutter though it's it's really easy once you start putting out personal items to clutter your workspace area and that makes it more confusing it saves you time if you don't have it out because you don't have to sort through all the junk that's on your desk. Now I'm going to go through 18 items that are on the top of my list when setting up any type of home workspace. Number one if you can use natural lighting so you'll want to position your desk somewhere near a window where you have that actual light coming in from outside it's a whole lot more calming relaxing and it's easier on your eyes than office lighting. Now my office is not set up that way as you can see I have a brick wall behind me but my office is not used for really working in it's more used for shooting videos in and since I do videos here this is a perfect environment for me. Number two high speed internet normally the type of internet you're going to get for your home is not that of what an office environment will be and if you're working a lot online maybe you know like we upload videos and download stuff we notice that big difference so go for a higher level of internet access if you can afford it in the beginning and you'll be a whole lot more productive think of it this way if you're waiting you know 10 20 minutes to upload and download files that's the actual time you could be working so you know having a much faster internet is going to be really helpful if you can afford to do so. They did a poll which I read the other day in Australia and they said the number one frustration of people in offices across the world right now is slow internet that that aggravated them more than anything that they could encounter in a daily basis. That one study revealed that the average person would wait one week a year just waiting for slow internet speed. Number three get a network router if you're going to have two or three computers hooked into the same internet a router is really a necessity get a good one don't go low end you know don't go high end but somewhere in the middle there and get a good router that's going to serve all your needs. You'll want to consider the area of your house if you have a longer house and it's more spread out you're going to want to place that router so that it reaches all the different locations that you may be using the internet. Number four get a surge protector this is so important that whatever you're plugging your computer into when a daily basis has a surge protector if you don't that little up and down variation of power can cause a lot of damage to your computer over time so make sure you have a surge protector. Number five consider your printer scanner as a multi-purpose tool you can use it for faxing you can use it for scanning whatever you're going to use it for. Now we have our setup to where any of the computers in the house any of our phones we can actually pull something up on our phone and actually print it out in the office so make sure you set it up that way we also have our ink cartridges tied into amazon so that when that ink cartridge gets low it actually signals amazon and amazon will ship us a new ink cartridge without us even having to think about it. Number six get a UPS an uninterruptible power supply now the way this works is it actually holds a charge in the power supply and if the power goes out it continues to feed your computer so you don't have that quick loss of power and cause damage to any of your office components. Number seven your desk what are you going to use your desk for this one here is mostly for videos so it's a pretty big area desk and my wife's desk is a little bit different it's farmhouse style it looks like this and it's a real nice desk it's comfortable for her and it's the style that she likes but you've got to pick what's going to work for you. Number eight try to have a clear workspace whatever type of desk you pick try not to have a lot of items on it the more you clutter your desk the more you're going to be shuffling stuff around the less productive you're going to be and you'll just basically waste time so try to keep everything put away if you can if you're not using that item right now put it away it's not necessary. Number nine your chair your chair your chair is so important get a super comfortable chair too many people worry about what the chair looks like instead of the ergonomics of it if you're going to be working from this desk for hours on the form in then you're going to want to have a comfortable chair so this is one area I would say don't scrimp money on make sure you buy a really nice chair a desk isn't going to matter that much the more money you spend it may look better but it's not going to function any differently I mean you could put a board in front of you when a couple saw horses and they would probably still work but sitting in a chair all day that's super important that you get something that's comfortable for you number ten adequate lighting nothing's worse than not having enough light and you have strain on your eyes you're going to end up with headaches you're not going to be able to work effectively so make sure in most houses don't have enough lighting for this you're probably going to have to either install some lighting or buy some optional lighting you know I have plenty of light in here because I do videos but that's what you need really is that extra lighting so that you can get more accomplished you can see what you're doing and you don't have any strain on your eyes number 11 decide on your telephone what are you going to use now we have done away with home phones so we don't have a home phone maybe you do want an office phone there's a lot of different services you can get now I actually just use my cell phone is all I actually use for business and it works for me so some people want to invest in a phone system I don't want to do it I don't I don't see the need for it but some of you out there will want to do that you can get something like a magic jack which is a free unlimited phone service that runs on the internet and you can actually use that now you can also get umatello free which is a cool phone service and it will actually block any robo calls or telemarketers but you can also choose to use something like Skype you can talk to people over Skype that way now that's not going to give you a business number however it does give you communications and if that's all you need you can always just use type number 12 a file cabinet someplace to put those files now I just use a couple drawers here in my desk I guess I could set up a file cabinet in here I don't want to I don't like files don't want them don't need them don't print stuff out but if you guys do certainly you'll want to consider getting a file cabinet set up number 13 file folders right you got to have folders um I think it's a good idea if you're going to file stuff and I did this years ago when I did keep a lot of files is I color coded them depending on what it had to do with so if it was advertising it was certain color if it was you know working on my website it was another color and that helped me organize in my head when I opened that drawer I could immediately look in there and find the item that I needed number 14 is storage now you're going to accumulate things from your office and they're going to build up mostly paperwork you'll find and you may want to figure out where you're going to store them now some of these items you won't need to get to very often and if you don't you don't even have to store them at your office location I know a lot of the files I have that are just records are in a separate storage facility and that's where we keep that stuff I don't even keep it in my office because I don't have to access it so you have to determine if it's something you need to access on a frequent basis you're going to have to have some type of storage it can be a portable bin with some wheels on it whatever you want that works for you number 15 greenery maybe I like plants if you like plants get you some plants they say that people are 15% more productive when they have greenery around so you may want to consider putting some plants in your office now I don't have outside light in my office so a plant wouldn't do good in here and then when I close my office down and turn out the lights this place is pitch black in here so a plant's not going to do well but if you have your desk set up by a window or something like that and you've got some outside light plants are great number 16 is a fire safe box people don't think about this but you know fires do happen and you may want to have like I have a safe in my office here that I can keep stuff in and keep it safe from a fire because it's a fire safe but maybe you want to get a small box depending on how many items you have it's a great item to have for your office though for things that you just can't afford to lose number 17 set parameters what I mean by that is you can't always be distracted by the kids or the dog or your wife or husband or whoever it is because when you get distracted it takes a long time to get back on track they say that when you're really entrenched in doing something and you get interrupted it can take you from 17 to 23 minutes to get back on track and that's a big waste of time so make sure you notify everybody what you're doing so that you don't get distracted number 18 in the final one set a schedule okay it is so easy to be working at home and get distracted by little things like oh I ought to go ahead and get that load of laundry in or I haven't knocked out those dishes yet or you only play with the dog for a couple minutes when you do that every time you do that you're eating up valuable time and all you have is time you can always get more money you can always get more stuff but time once it's gone it's gone so you need to set up a schedule for instance today I'm shooting videos so from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. is video shooting time that's it I'm not allowed to do anything else I can't work on other projects or anything like that I can stop for lunch I can get up and go to the restroom but I know for those hours I have to do those things now if I get finished prior to that time then I can work on another item but I don't work on anything else until I complete those videos now I know you're going to be tempted to do other things in your home office it's so easy because you got access to the internet and social media and all that but set some parameters for yourself certain things don't need to be done all day long you know say I'm going to check my email in the morning afternoon and evening and that's it don't check it you know 25 times a day not necessary to do that that will just waste more time I hope this video helped you out and get your home office setup there's all kinds of configurations you know this is my home office this is where I work out of and film my videos but a lot of times at night I'm on the couch too with a pillow there my laptop and getting some work done there too so you don't have to do it all in your workspace don't feel like you do but it's good to have one because that signifies hey I'm at work I'm working right now that's what I'm supposed to do if I'm sitting on the couch and I'm working on something on my computer it's too easy to you know look at social media look at some show on tv so when I'm in the office it is office time and that's how you got to set it up for yours too I hope you enjoyed this video don't forget I've got a $97 e-commerce course for a limited time you can grab it for free it's in the description below you just got to click the link click and learn no credit card required simple and easy now if you haven't subscribed yet what you got to subscribe hit that button down there go ahead and subscribe and don't forget hit that bell notification too and when you do you got to turn on all notifications and then you become part of the Fisher family awesome right that's right you become a VIP the person that what gets notified before anybody else that's super cool so don't forget to do that too thank you so much for watching this video put your comments below let me know what you think of the video let me know what you think of some of these ideas give me some ideas that you're doing and I'll see you in the next video hey thanks for watching my video don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video also click on one of those videos there keep watching on my channel