7 Easy Tips to Make your Work Space Conducive for Online Classes

Are you taking online classes from your bed? Here are some easy-to-follow tips to help you improve your productivity at home by making some adjustments to your home office for school. The road to an A+ starts with a conducive work space to do all your serious work!

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1. Invest in a comfy chair.

Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way. You won’t get anything done if you’re adjusting your butt all the time from sitting all day long. Fight your siblings for the most ‘comfortable-but-not-too-comfy’ chair in your house!

Ideally, it should not be hard to the touch nor something without a back rest.

Nobody wants back problems before they’ve reached the age of 25! If you can’t find a chair with cushions, get creative by placing pillows on your back and butt for a cheap DIY solution.

2. Position yourself near the wi-fi router.

Everyone knows that the worst part about Zoom is the fact that we have to deal with poor AF internet connection in the Philippines. Sometimes, we’re just nodding along with whoever’s talking even though we’re actually only hearing chopped-up bits on our end.

Perhaps the worst part of a choppy internet connection is when our video freezes and the other people on the call can take a screenshot of us at our most unflattering!

So to avoid all these mishaps, make sure you’re taking classes as near as possible to your wi-fi router. Get all dem signals!

3. Keep your notebooks on your desk.

This one is for the people who just can’t take proper notes on their computers. And even if you can, it’s difficult to do when half of your screen is being eaten up by your Zoom window.

That’s why we recommend always having your notebooks prepared on your desk. Every time you take them out for a quick review session later, make sure you return them back to your work space.

By doing this, you avoid wasting time looking for your notebook during a class because you don’t know where you had placed it!

4. Have some snacks ready.

Just like school during the good ol’ pre-COVID days, we will probably stay up too late at night and use up all the snoozes in our alarm before actually waking up. In the new normal, this means attending online lectures without washing our face nor brushing our teeth first.

And worse, a 40 to 90-minute lecture at 7AM just means that we are going to have to skip out on breakfast. That’s why you should always have a ready-to-eat snack on your desk! Whether it’s a granola bar or good ol’ Sky Flakes, it’s good to munch on something in these criminally early lectures.

Hey, that’s more reason to wake up in the morning!

If you find yourself snacking too much throughout the day, you can just place one snack on your table every night before going to bed. By doing this, you’ll be able to avoid binge-eating until your last class ends.

5. Change up your light.

Did you know the color of light that you are exposed to is correlated with your productivity levels? Whiter, cooler light helps you focus on the task at hand while warmer light invites a sense of comfort. Even being hit by sunlight alone can already improve your mood and energy!

Consider these when setting-up your home office for school like which room in the house to set-up your work area and where to position your table. You may also want to get a desk lamp where you are able to adjust the warmth of the bulb.

You can even adjust the settings of your computer screen to make sure that you’re getting hit by the right color temperature at the right time of day.

There are apps that can help you do this automatically, with f.lux being the most popular one. It’s available on Windows, Mac, iPhone & Android so make sure you install it all your devices, too!

6. Have essentials ready.

It’s almost flu season in the Philippines, which means waking up to major morning allergy. That’s why a whole roll of toilet paper on your work space is a must!

There are also other things that’s just better to have by your side all the time. A bottle of alcohol for quick hand-cleaning, a handheld mirror for teeth-checking, a cap for bad hair days, and a pitcher of water for when you need to calm your nerves when the teacher is getting angry.

7. Remove the clutter.

Always Marie Kondo your desk from time to time! Not only does a clean environment help you feel that you’re being more productive, but you also reduce the risk of getting distracted.

You might not notice it, but there are times throughout the day when you place something unnecessary on your desk. And if Chekhov’s gun taught us anything, that object is going to be a pretty huge distraction for us later on.

Personally, my number one culprit is the nailcutter that magically appears on my home office desk. When a Zoom lecture gets boring, I absentmindedly reach out for it and start chipping away at my fingernails. Before I know it, all the important things being discussed are over!

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For some of us, having a home office for school is a blessing in of itself. However, we do miss the days when we stayed at the library or the coffee shop cramming all our papers.

While not the same, our work space can give us that familiar feeling of productivity again; we just need to know how to arrange it in the best way possible.

You know what’s inevitable even if school is going virtual? Group works! Read about the six types of oddly-specific groupmates here.

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