Typically, I try to avoid working at home.

It’s strange, since I’m a freelance writer and independent contractor my home is technically my “office.” Most of the work I do is from home, and though I don’t have the numbers in front of me *rifles through notes* I’d say I spend about 70% of my non-tutoring work from home. But, since my living quarters are my workspace, I like to treat it as I do all of my non-home offices. Like my classrooms, mostly.

I need it to be clean.

My classroom used to be heralded by the custodial staff for being the cleanest in the entire school, and I took that pride and instilled it into my students. We spent 5 minutes at the end of every day to clean up our room. Multiplied by 30 kids, that’s a good deal of cleaning. According to my numbers *rifles through notes* but that’s roughly 4700 minutes of cleaning.

Not a mathematician.

So combine my need to clean my workspace with the very typical human emotion of “I don’t want to clean my house it’s my house no one can tell me what to do I will live in my own filth,” and you see the conflict.

I sit my desk in the corner, turned away from the television. I used to have my desk against the wall, in the middle of the room, and that never felt right. It felt like I was trying to declare my work as more important than people’s foot space. The corner creates a comforting closed-off feeling, like a sensory deprivation tank that keeps me focused.

The rest of the visual space is filled up by things that are either necessary for my work or stuff that inspires me. My goal is to have all the artwork rotate, featuring different styles and genres from people I typically find at comic cons. I’ll talk about the art of people I love in a future post, probably. There’s a foam Keyblade from Kingdom Hearts, one of my top 3 favorite video games of all time and a real inspiration for how I’d want my epic fantasies to feel. The white board details deadlines of various projects assigned per quarter. Along the wall against the back of the desk are notebooks. All the notebooks. Field Notes used for day to day writing, novel ideas that aren’t being pursued, Bullet Journals from the last two years, task notebooks, and onward. Gray rack holds all pertinent materials to my current writing projects.

Honestly, I could spend another 1000 words talking about all the little things at my desk that keep me in the right headspace to work, but just keep looking and let me know about your own home office