Working from a home office has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s great to be able to control your own schedule, start when you like, finish when you like, have a two-hour lunch break if it suits you.
You don’t have to commute anywhere, you don’t have your boss breathing down your neck and if there are co-workers that you don’t like, you don’t have to put up with their nonsense on a daily basis.
The downsides are numerous too of course. It can be a lonely life, if you’re in the right office environment you wouldn’t have to worry about an overbearing boss or annoying employees because they’d be people you get along with.
But perhaps worse than the social aspect of it is the fact that at home you’ve got distractions everywhere , and there’s no real pressure not to give in to these distractions. No one is going to notice if you stop working to do something unproductive.
The best solution to this is to have a place in your home where you can isolate yourself from all of these distractions. A soundproofed booth or room should do the trick. It will just be a place of pure focus where procrastination can’t find you.
I would argue that this is actually one of the advantages of working from home because you probably won’t be allowed to soundproof your space in an office building, whether it’s an actual room or just a cubicle it would probably be against company policy.
But here’s a couple of ways that you can do it in your home office:
Sound Reduction Paint
Yes, there is such a thing . It sounds a little ridiculous but it actually works really well. It’s just like any other kind of paint that you’d find out there. You can cover the walls and the ceiling with it, do it over a week or so and have the office ready.
It basically serves as sound absorption and it’s effective without the need for any additives or chemicals that you wouldn’t expect in ordinary paint. So it’s non-toxic and it’s super easy to clean up.
It’s for sure one of the easiest ways to reduce the noise in your office so it’s well worth giving it a shot.
Acoustic Window Inserts
So the paint will do the job on your walls, but a lot more noise is going to be coming in through the windows. And it won’t be as simple as closing the drapes, that will reduce the noise a little bit but not to any significant degree.
Anywhere that air can get through, noise can get through so what you need to do is trap the air in between the window and something else. Something much more sturdy than a hanging strip of fabric like a curtain.
Acoustic window inserts are made of acrylic and you can get them designed specifically to fit your window frame. They would also be built to blend into the window so that they’re hard to notice and won’t interfere with the aesthetic.
Numerous Rugs
This works quite a bit better than you might expect it too. Rugs are good for more than just looking nice and feeling nice under your feet, you can use them to absorb some sound in your office too.
This is especially useful if your office is not on the ground floor. Any sound coming up won’t stand a chance of getting to you through both the floorboards and several rugs. Try and cover as much of the floor as you can.
They don’t have to be expensive ones, get old ones at thrift stores and the like. And don’t worry about how they look, it’s your office, no one cares if you’ve got a strange rug or two in there that doesn’t match the rest of the room.
Plants
Plants are actually really great for sound absorption. You should be able to reduce the sound in your office by half if you’ve got a couple of plants in there. The best ones for this purpose would be some of the more common houseplants.
Things like ferns, weeping figs and peace lilies are fantastic and the other major advantage to this is the fact that plants can aid you in your concentration too. So the effect that houseplants can have on your productivity is actually two-fold in that sense.
You can try all of these techniques or maybe even just one depending on the current situation with your office. You might only need to use one of these tricks to sufficiently reduce the noise levels.
No matter what, the end goal is to turn your office into a silent space, and once you do that, you’ll notice the changes to your productivity pretty quickly.
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