As Earth Abides in the face of Covid-19 (SARS 2 electric boogaloo), the need for a practical, budget, home office is more relavant than ever. If you are lazy like me, you may have avoided creating a proper home office for home working, I had a bad habit of just setting up in the kitchen with my laptop, never bothering to create a proper office space. But now, many of us will be working from home for the forcible future, so lets make a nice, comfortable and budget home office; to increase productivity and provide separated work/life living area which is good for our mental health and productivity.
Due to the Covid-19 madness, some of the products may have a delay for their deliveries, so we have made an effort to find items that have a decent delivery time.
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#1 Simple Black Desk 
This black composite wooden desk is very reasonably priced and wouldn’t take up much space in your home office. Click through the link and check out some of the personal photos to see the desk in action. It looks pretty nice for the price, certainly a great desk to grab in a pinch. This desk also comes with the prestigious Amazon’s Choice sticker too. Some of the customer photos show some product defects, so you may want to check out some of the more pricey desks, however many of them at the time of writing have very long delivery delays due to Covid-19.
#2 Plants Plants Plants
This is an easy one, get some plants in there! I am currently using plants on a shelf to screen the back wall of my spare room (which is now a home office) for when I make video calls. Plants mainly give a great aesthetic appeal to your home working space, there is probably a load of ‘clean air’ nonsense around about home plants however, as the research in that link shows you would probably need thousands of plants in a small space for any noticable air cleaning benefit. Still, a good office planting scheme will make you feel more relaxed and pad out your home office nicely. Check out are 10 really hard to kill house plants for some easy to care for home plants, some of which you may still be aple to pick up from your local supermarket.
#3 Footrest
This is a nice cheeky little addition to your home office, it’s not always easy to find a good chair to desk unit height-ratio, so your feet are comfortably hitting the ground; enter a cheap and adjustable foot rest! There are also other styles you can buy through the link from the same seller.
#4 Reasonably Priced Ergonomic Desk Chair
This ergonomic mesh backed chair is one of the most reasonably priced chair we found on Amazon, it looks comfortable, professional, with adjustable height and wheels. Combined with the above footrest this should make a nice home working chair for your new office space. It comes in eight different colors if you wanted to color match it with another item in your home office.
#5 Metal Desk
A nice and simple metal desk to place a new monitor on or yor laptop/desktop with space for files and stuff below. Remember, the top of the monitor should be approximately eye level for the best and most comfortable viewing position.
#6 HP Pavilion Monitor
21. 5 inch HD monitor, an optional extra for a home office but sometimes if you just have a work laptop it’s nice to have a large monitor to view extra files on. The monitor comes AC power cord, VGA cable, and power adapter so you can get going straight away. You can also tilt the monitor for the optimum screen position.
#7 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
This wireless keyboard and mouse combo conects to your laptop or PC with one micro, wireless USB. Remember, you will need AA/AAA batteries for the mouse and keyboard. Not much more to say about these, they are useful if you are working with your work laptop and want to mount the laptop for optimal viewing, see below for a simple laptop stand.
#8 Simple Laptop Stand
As mentioned previously with the moniter, when working with a laptop for long periods, on a desk, you want the top of the sreen to meet your eyeline. So with this simple laptop stand you can raise your laptop and attatch the keyboard and mouse for optimal working conditions.
#9 Lumbar Support Pillow
Made of memory foam, this lower back support can easily strap to your computer chair. This lumbar support pillow also has the prestigious Amazon’s Choice sticker.
General Tips
I have been working from home for most of last year and this year so here’s some useful general tips.
#Tip 1: Dress for the job you want to do.
A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggested that professionals perform better on tasks when wearing clothes with “symbolic meaning.” So presumably if you are wearing sweat pants and an oversized hoody whilst crunching the numbers, your giving your subconscious mixed messages. In the study, they found that doctors were more focused and performed better at work when wearing a lab coat.
Now I didn’t always dress up to the nines everyday, however I at least made an effort to sort my hair out, have a shave and put on a nice top – which is also useful for surprise Skype calls from your line manager…
#Tip 2 Grab an exercise bike!
When you’re not walking around an office, it’s easy to feel a bit cramped and seized up when working from home. Grabbing an exercise bike really helped me blast away the cobwebs in my joints and also maintain a level of fitness – more so that if I was stuck in an office!
Thanks for reading! Check out some of our other articles for how to decorate your male living space.
– James
FURNISH HIM 