But this freedom has a flipside too. Working at home can feel chaotic, especially if we’re operating in cramped quarters or constantly besieged by domestic duties.

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By the numbers

29%—Percentage of remote workers in the US who say they struggle with work-life balance

4—Number of extra hours Microsoft employees worked each week during the Covid-19 lockdown

$20.70—Cost of a three-minute call from New York to San Francisco in 1915. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530 today

$850—Average cost of a fax machine for the home in 1991, that’s $1,600 today

23 hours, 39 minutes—Standing record for world’s longest Zoom meeting

$20,000—Average cost of building a standard 12 x12 ft home office in the US

218 mbps—Average download speed in Singapore, the country currently with the fastest fixed broadband connectivity

3%—Increase in value for a single family home in the US with access to broadband internet prior to the pandemic

100 inches—Diameter of Hugh Hefner’s bed, which doubled as a desk

$24,000—Auction price of a groovy Algeco 1969 pre-fab home office pod

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The market for home offices

Forget hardwood floors, marble countertops, or walk-in closets, real estate agents say that building a home office is the wisest home upgrade right now. A recent study by the property referral company Homelight says that homeowners can expect to recoup 87% of their investment at the point of sale.

The most compelling selling point about having a dedicated home office is privacy. Realtors across the US and Canada are already advertising “Zoom rooms”—a conducive space for virtual calls—in their listings. “If you’re going to work from home, especially if you have kids, you’re going to need that extra space,” explained Quebec-based broker Joe Brimo to the Montreal Gazette. “It was cute at first, [when] the dog would bark or the kid would come into the room…But it’s got to the point now where people say, ‘Hey this is a business. Let’s get serious and get the job done.’” Enterprising interior designers like the Washington-DC based studio Residents Understood are already offering Zoom room virtual makeovers, starting at $350.

🎧 For more intel on building an effective home office, listen to the Work Reconsidered podcast episode on office design. Or subscribe via: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Stitcher.

For those building their dream houses from the ground up, KB Home, a major homebuilder in the US, began offering home offices in their floor plans last month. The customizable rooms are equipped with built-in desks, open shelving, phone jacks, task lighting and lots of charging ports. Working from home, “in a lot of cases, is looking like it may become permanent,” says CEO Jeffrey Mezger. “We think that [the home office] will be a standard part of a house over time.”

KB Home began offering home offices in their floor plans last month.
KB Home began offering home offices in their floor plans last month.
Image: KB Homes

Mezger says including a dedicated home office in stock floor plans signals a significant shift. “What our industry has done for decades is we would merchandise a secondary bedroom as a potential home office,” he explains. “This time, building in a desk with real file drawers and real shelving is different from staging an office.”

German economists are cheering the work-from-home renaissance. Speaking to The Local, Michael Voigtländer, property expert at the German Economic Institute, says it can level the housing market and bolster suburban and rural areas. “Remote working could make a larger area around the city more attractive,” he explained.

All this is contingent on a robust internet connection—the most important utility of decentralized workforces and now the top deciding factor for homebuyers, according to a USA Today report. A 2013 study by the University of Colorado and Carnegie Mellon University established the link between home prices and internet speed. Homes located in areas with broadband access not only sell quicker but also command 7% more in price compared to homes in areas with slower internet speeds.

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MVP: Most valuable products (and practices)

Depending on your job and proclivity, a home office set-up can be as sparse or elaborate as you might imagine. The architecture arm of the legendary Italian car maker Pininfarina, for instance, has introduced a prototype for an eight-in-one work-from-home kit meant to serve the needs of wellness-minded remote workers. Packaged in a tube, it unfolds into a laptop stand and includes a small 4K projector; bluetooth speakers with a microphone and a noise cancelation system; LED lights that track circadian rhythms, a handheld air purifier, and even a small desk plant as a nod to biophilic design. (This isn’t Pininfarina’s only foray in designing tools for the office. They’ve also designed an ultra-luxurious office chair priced at $1.5 million.)

A survey of the growing catalog of tools vying for the burgeoning home office market, shows what people are in search of: focus, support, connection, and delight.

Focus

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Image: Amanda Berglund for Quartz
“The Mobile Work Unit” concept by Vital.
“The Mobile Work Unit” concept by Vital.
Image: Vital

Connection

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Image: Amanda Berglund for Quartz

Support

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Image: Amanda Berglund for Quartz
Image for article titled How to design a happy home office
Image: Amanda Berglund for Quartz

Delight

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Image: Amanda Berglund for Quartz
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The zen of working from home: Four takes on the optimal home office

A professor from Manila, live from New York, WFH 👩‍💻 Manhattan, New York

Conducting three university courses for 150 students via Zoom with a 12-hour time difference is no small production. But Ida Anita del Mundo, who is conducting virtual classes in art, film appreciation, and literature for De La Salle University Manila from New York, seems to have quickly mastered the craft. Del Mundo is a filmmaker, a classical musician, and my cousin. Her secret: Prepare for each class like a performance.

“I feel that everything I know about filmmaking and performing has come into play for this,” explains del Mundo. Using her training as a director, she created a mini-studio with ample lighting, camera and sound rig in a corner of her uncle’s apartment in Manhattan where she’s been staying since the coronavirus lockdown began in March. “I ended up setting up with the New York City skyline behind me. On the first day of class, I had to explain to my students that it wasn’t a stock Zoom background,” she says.

Ida Anita del Mundo
Image: Ida Anita del Mundo

Every week, del Mundo writes a script, prepares slides, and sometimes even produces a lecture video. “Teachers today have to be the research, the scriptwriter, the sound editor, the cinematographer and the talent!” she says. “You realize how much time you need to prepare for these online classes.” She does get a bit of help from her former production manager, who she hired to “produce” her classes.

Del Mundo says she’s learned to dress for the part too. “I seldom wear make-up when I’m teaching in person, but I’m wearing a bit now,” she says. “I realized early on that this was a performance, and people are essentially seeing a close-up.”

Ida Anita del Mundo
Lights, camera, lecture.
Image: Ida Anita del Mundo

“I think if you’re well-lit, project clearly, and present yourself well, your students see that you’re well-prepared—that you showed up. I believe this helps hold their attention,” she notes. Being transparent about her unexpected predicament and the fact that she’s appearing in the wee hours of the morning also helped establish a rapport with her students,” del Mundo says. “That really set the tone. Perhaps that’s why they’re quite engaged—or at least I like to think so. They know that I’m staying up for them. I’ve been anxious that it would be hard to transition online, but they’ve been really great.”

A business owner attuned to neurodiversity, WFH 👩‍💻 Miami, Florida

When Covid-19 cases began peaking in late March, Alex Daly, founder of a communications and marketing firm in New York City, decided to relocate to Florida and be with her parents. With partner Hamish Smyth, Daly took a few suitcases, their laptops, computer monitors, and strapped her office chair in the back seat of a sedan to make the 18-hour drive south.

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Image: Alex Daly

Diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder in 2017, Daly says it was crucial to maintain a sense of order, especially during the most stressful scenarios. Once in Miami, she quickly created a proper home office in a spare room next to her childhood bedroom. “My parents both own their businesses and they both have their respective workspaces. It was almost like we were in a co-working space in my parents’ home.”

“Some people think that it’s very strange or funny that I brought my own chair,” she says. “But it was important for me to create this environment that felt really safe and that felt like an office. I think it was to create some level of control during this really insane environment we’re currently living in.”

Establishing a routine helps, too. Daly begins each day with exercise before diving into work at 9:30 am. She fits in an afternoon walk often while taking phone calls, and tries to hit 5,000 to 10,000 steps a day. At the end of the work day, she and Smyth jump in the car and drive aimlessly for 45 minutes. “We put on some music or a podcast, we roll down the windows,” she says. “It’s been so helpful for clearing my head. It’s nice to feel like you’re returning home at the end of it and makes things feel less like Groundhog Day where days just blend together.”

Happy place.
Happy place.
Image: Alex Daly

Daly adds that attending to her mental health and thinking about neurodiversity has made her more attuned to her team’s anxiety levels. “Managers and leaders who struggle with mental health who work on themselves can create a higher sense of empathy,” she explains, “I feel that I’ve been a little bit more aware of what my team needs.”

Juggling a consultancy and two kids, WFH 👩‍💻 Lancaster, South Carolina

There’s no such thing as a regular schedule for Liza Morris. The founder of Alkemi Group, a science communications consultancy in Washington, Morris’s days are largely shaped by the needs of her two young children and her clients, who at times, are in a different time zone.

“I try to get some exercise on the days I can squeeze that in before the kids get up. Then, there’s the care and feeding of small humans. It’s just kind of balancing back and forth,” she says. Sometimes that entails working 18-hour days.

A retreat from home: A shed that Morris’s grandfather once used as his office
A retreat from home: A shed that Morris’s grandfather once used as his office
Image: Liza Morris

The pandemic has made things even more onerous. With both kids homeschooling, Morris says it’s harder to get blocks of focused work. “I feel like I am working all the time, because it’s harder to get things done because there are a lot of distractions,” she says. A self-described extrovert, she says working at home isn’t her preferred scenario. Before the pandemic, she often worked on site in her clients’ offices, and felt energized by reporting to an office.

During the early months of the pandemic, Morris, her husband, and her two children decided to move in with her mother in South Carolina. She feels indebted to her mother who is not only helping with child care duties but also relinquished most of the house to them. She even gave up her bedroom, so Morris can set up a home office in a quiet part of the house. Even then, privacy is hard to come by, Morris says. She tells the story of how her toddlers somehow managed to break the door lock several times: “If I had a call that needed privacy, I would just turn go in the bathroom, turn on the fan, and take it there,” she explains. Morris is mulling moving her operations to a backyard shed which her grandfather once used as an office.

How does she find joy during such a hectic time? “It’s hard to not be joyful when you’re around small kids,” she says, noting that she’s decorated her makeshift office with their drawings. Being close to nature has also been a blessing. “I’ve watched a lot of baby birds grow in the last few months,” Morris explains. “I actually fed a hummingbird out of my hand the other day.” Last month, she also kept a rescue kitten in her desk drawer until finding someone to adopt it.

“Every time I start feeling sorry for myself, I just have to remind myself that I have it so much better than so many people right now…My mom is a retired music teacher and she’s teaching both of the kids piano. It’s the best Covid bonus ever,” Morris says. “I have client work, I have my mom helping us, I can’t complain.”

A startup CEO and champion remote worker, WFH 👨‍💻 Madrid, Spain

Give Suraj Sudhakar a laptop, silence, and some snacks and he can be productive anywhere. The founder and CEO of CoolCoach, a wellness-focused social enterprise headquartered in Pune, India, says the key is learning what kind of work style you thrive in.

Early in his career as a computer engineer, he often finished his tasks before heading to the office. “I realized that going into the office was unproductive for me if I didn’t have meetings,” says Sudhakar who spoke to Quartz perfectly situated in his brother-in-law’s empty apartment in Madrid. “I learned that I prefer big chunks of time at one goal to get work done.”

Reading Paul Graham’s essay titled “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” was eye-opening, says Sudhakar. In his 2009 essay, Graham, who is best known for founding the startup accelerator Y Combinator, outlines how managers can feel productive by dividing their day in small increments, for meetings and check-ins. Makers, on the other hand, need chunks of uninterrupted time to get their work done. In running his startup, Sudhakar has learned to manage his calendar based on the type of task he has to tackle that day.

As much as he champions remote work, Sudhakar recognizes that some workers thrive best when surrounded by others in a bustling office. “You need different structures, different environments to make different people productive,” he says.

Sudhakar suggests that the months of forced remote work can be a rare chance to experiment and discover our own work styles, and in doing so, have more agency over our happiness. “Many people have not had the chance to have a separate set-up,” he points out. “When you join a workforce you’re expected to go to the office and, whether you like it or not, you build your life around it.”

Image for article titled How to design a happy home office

More than ever, it’s become clear that the established templates for office architecture—from open-plan layouts to cubicle farms—need a rethink. A home office, in essence, offers a testing ground for figuring out how, where, and when we do our best work. As stressful as it is to upend our 9 to 5 routines, this year presents a rare opportunity to experiment with new configurations. And when we’re finally able to report back to our old desks—even on a part time basis—we’ll hopefully have more agency to tailor the space where we spend most of our day.

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