Every good entrepreneur will tell you that the best way to turn your investment into profit is not to waste money on side projects but to focus on the main goals defined in the business plan. If focus is the keyword in the world of business, then design, and office design in particular, is no different. You need a home office that is designed, decorated, and furnished in such a manner that all the details scream out: work atmosphere! This will act as a counterweight to the dormant and torpid atmosphere inside the home

The best design solution for a home office is minimalism. Its main postulate guarantees that the office will feature only items that are necessary for work and important for you personally, as everything else, including clutter, will have to leave the space of the home office. By being able to focus on the tasks ahead, you will be able to increase productivity over time, so (re)designing a minimalist home office might be the best thing you lately did to improve your business operations.

Clearing the walls

The biggest surfaces inside your house are by far the walls. All that empty space seems alluring to hang different things from them, ranging from diplomas all the way to pictures of your family. We are not stating that these objects do not belong in a home office, quite the contrary, as an image of the loved ones can be a great motivator. However, they do not belong on the wall, as this area is probably already full of post-it notes related to work that are disrupting the homely ambient.

Such vertical chaos, to put it like that, has no place in a home office, so the first step in ushering in minimalist design is to clear the walls. Personal images will have to be placed on the desk or in another room in the house, while everything related to work that needs to be on display should be put on a notice board.

A paperless office space

It should be clear to everyone by now how detrimental for the environment overuse of paper is. This means that you should immediately stop printing e-mails and other documents that already exist in the electronic form. You can even organize a digitalization of old files that can all be scanned, thus becoming easily searchable. In essence, the less paper you have lying around the desk, the better. Since it is only possible to decrease their numbers but not get rid of the paper format altogether, we recommend placing an inbox on the desk and practicing tidiness so no sheet of paper ends up outside the designated area. Any old filing cabinets should be moved downstairs to the basement or to some other location, like storage depo, where they will not get into the way.

A coffee machine for your pleasure

If you thought that a minimalist design only meant throwing stuff out, you were wrong. In minimalism, functionality is the most important goal to achieve but that does not mean that you cannot afford something luxurious here and there. Investing in yourself is extremely important since a smile on your face is priceless early in the morning when you see a hot cup of coffee on the desk. In terms of design, “watering holes,” such as water coolers and coffee machines, act as social hubs in large companies but you can turn your coffee machine into a private oasis of relaxation. In other words, there is no way that Italian designed office coffee machines could not find its way into your kitchen, just a few steps away from the home office. Their sexy outlines and the colors black and silver go well with any design and complement the machines’ main function of making coffee to help you get through another day of working around the clock.

Decluttering the desk

Like we stated in the introduction, decluttering the home office and the entire house is an integral part of minimalist design suited for home office space. However, one area in particular is prone to clutter, so you should start combating this pesky piling up of stuff at the core of the problem. The immediate desk area is highly susceptible to clutter. The desktop is usually full of things you don’t need, so try to understand that a computer monitor, a family picture, and an inbox are more than enough for this location. Everything else should go in drawers which main function is exactly that: keeping possible clutter out of sight. It is, therefore, useful to keep one drawer, possibly the bottom one, empty at all times, so you can chuck all the clutter in it at the end of a long day spent working since you probably lack the time for a proper clean-up.

As you have seen from these guidelines, minimalism will improve both the design of the home office as well as boost your level of satisfaction. If you are organized, focused, and generally happy with your home office, you can do more work for a shorter amount of time.