Is Your Home Office Environmentally-Friendly?
Whether you enjoy flexible working hours in your role or you’re an independent professional, you’ve probably read dozens of articles on how to create a productive and exciting home office environment. Ultimately, whether you work from home every day or less frequently, you know that your best work doesn’t happen at the kitchen table or on the sofa. Despite its appeal in contemporary media, the idea of working from home in your pyjamas while sitting in front of the TV or lying in bed is incorrect. You need to create a space that is dedicated to work.
Countless articles can provide guidance on how to turn an unused nook in the living room into a self-contained office for people who live in a small home. If you’re lucky enough to have a spare bedroom you can transform into a home office, you can be more creative about your decor and the type of furniture to use – nothing says boss life like a big and comfy chair. But, have you ever considered how your home-based work space affects the environment? Indeed, your home office should not only facilitate productivity, but it should also be green.
It has a high carbon footprint
While we might all dream of an organised and tidy home office, it’s easy to maintain for everyone. If you don’t work from home regularly, you may not be able to spend any time putting everything back in its place. Similarly, if you’re struggling with urgent deadlines and hectic work pace, you may be too busy to notice the clutter. But, ultimately, you can’t be productive in a messy place. First of all, you’re likely to lose important documents or items in the mess, but you could also end up owning duplicates of most of your belongings because you can’t find them anymore. As things pile up, they significantly affect your energy consumption. Did you know that a cluttered room needed more energy to heat because the warm air can’t circulate? The same principle applies to cooling down the room.
It’s time to transform your office
It’s not uncommon for home-based workers to plan a yearly clear up, during which they decide to remove the clutter. However, if you’ve planned to keep your home office clean to tackle environmental issues, you need to do it by the book. You can find professional removal companies that can help you to get rid of your stuff such as The Waste Group skip hire for waste management. As you’re in the process of removing duplicates and unused items, also make sure to dedicate time to upgrade your storage system – as it will avoid the come back of clutter.
You have harmful habits
Lastly, there is no point in transforming your office to reduce your environmental footprint if you persevere in maintaining destructive practices, such as printing. Most people prefer to consume information in a printed format; however, you are only increasing clutter and wasting resources. Cloud services can let you search and access information online. Creating a digital cabinet can help you to reduce your consumption of paper.
We live at a time and age when we can’t ignore how our habits affect the environment anymore. The home office is, by far, the most toxic room as the accumulation of bad habits and poor storage strategies can dramatically increase your carbon footprint. It’s time for a change, for your peace of mind and the environment.