I'm preparing to shift to a fully remote work setup and want to maximise its effectiveness. So I would like to ask you, which work-from-home purchases had the most significant positive impact on your comfort, productivity, and well-being?
"Real" Chair (Steelcase / Herman Miller) and four-legged standing desk (better stability). Plus a handheld "mouse" (ELECOM Relacon) so when I'm reading I can stand differently or do light movement/exercise. Blowing $2.5K on a desk + chair is a lot, but also not a lot depending on your perspective.
I second the recommendation of Steelcase. I bought my Steelcase Leap chair five years ago, and it's still rock solid and has no noticeable wear.
My wife recently decided to buy one too, and she got hers refurbished from a company called BTOD. I was impressed with the quality. It was indistinguishable from mine (which I bought new) and cost half the price.
I got a used Gesture on eBay and also was impressed. Definitely a great way to score an excellent chair for cheap. Buying new seems best if you need more optional features or a different material.
I ended up giving that to my ex and getting a new one exactly how I wanted it and have no regrets, even though it was really expensive. The Gesture really is a lovely chair.
I bought a leap v2 and had to return it, the top of the backrest is not straight and this is apparently almost by design and within their tolerance, which I find unbelievable for 1k+ chair.
Have been with the Steelcase Amia for 2 years now and am quite happy.
Hard to say. I can't find any explanation of the differences between v1 and v2. I bought mine in April 2018 from Amazon, and my receipt just says, "Steelcase Leap, Black" with no version.
Depends on the person RE the chair, some friends seem to get various pains with Herman Miller chairs, I see practically no difference having used one vs using cheapo ones. But if it works for you then more power to you!
Chairs should probably be bought in brick and mortar stores, where you can try them out before you buy. Better if it has a good return policy if the first impression is deceiving.
Like shoes, mattresses, etc... a chair is a very personal thing and price and general reputation is not always a good indication of how well you will feel.
Absolutely. Before I was WFH full time, I tended to buy whatever chair seemed nice enough, but never spent over $200 USD. About a week after our companies WFH order I realized it was really causing discomfort after long work session. I went with a Secretlab gaming chair. Despite the "gaming" part, it's pretty solid and I've been very happy with it. Several friends and coworkers have purchased them on my recommendation and have been happy with them as well.
By "real" I mean a chair actually designed for 7-hours a day 5-days a week usage and warrantied as such. Ergonomics and build quality is key. Expect to pay around $1K.
Picked up a Mirra 1 at auction for $150 this year. Pretty happy with it.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: I have a two laptop stands, and a KVM switch to flip my screen, keyboard, mouse and a decent powered USB hub between my work laptop and personal laptop. Pretty handy.
Also an aquarium. Nice to have a bit of life and movement in the room. Hard plastic carpet protector. Office chairs can be murder on carpet.
True, but also note that it won't be warrantied the same way. That's just an inherent trade-off, Steelcase has a limited lifetime warranty which I've already used to replace the lift after 10-years.
A Herman Miller Aeron, Mirra, Cosm, or similar can usually be found at a liquidation company for a lot less than retail. Keep in mind that they are repairable and parts are readily available, there are not many other brands that have that kind of support.
Some of the things that make most difference to me
* Teleprompter so you can look at camera and the person you're talking to at the same time. Significantly reduces zoom fatigue for me.
* A bright key light. As well as meaning you can be seen on camera I've found it significantly improves my mood having a bright light in front of me that's diffuse enough to not dazzle.
* Bone conduction headphones are significantly more pleasant than traditional headphones/earphones for long days of meetings
* Decent microphone. Recommend Shotgun mic or lapel mic if you have ambient sound.
* Decent chair (good second hand options from failed startups)
* A decent camera (reused a mirrorless I already had)
* Decent coffee machine
* Large monitor
* Wacom tablet for diagraming
* Aircon (in UK this is uncommon but climate warming means it's unpleasant to be without for more of the year)
I'd love to see a picture of your setup, if you're comfortable sharing it. I have a hard time imagining what it all looks like. It sounds like it's quite a production!
I use it for controlling lights, mute/unmute across zoom/teams/hangouts and raising various apps to foreground via little scripts. Mostly just executing wmctrl.
My dog of 15.5 years passed away recently and I thought I would allow a few months to grieve and experience life without a pet. 2 weeks later and I got another dog. Very nice to have something around and a good excuse for a couple walks throughout the day.
Otherwise I recommend decent speakers (I have a pair of Sonos Era 100s). I don't have many meetings besides the daily standup so filling the silence with some nice sounding music really helps me get in the groove.
Chair: yes but doesn’t need to be expensive. I’m still dragging around an office chair from 2002. It just fits me.
Separate your space. Make sure your work and home environments don’t collide. Once I learned this lesson, I bought a used RV and converted it. Power, A/C, fridge - just plug into the house and you’re good. Once the rats infested it and got me sick over and over, I switched to a Lowe’s Garden Shed. Now, replete with a basic folding table and all my stuff.
Synergy. One mouse & keyboard + clipboard, shared across all machines. From left to right, I have a personal intel NUC, work MBP intel, work MBP m1, personal MBP m1. Each with an extra monitor positioned above the machine. So effectively it’s like a single giant machine but workloads can be isolated. So nice. Game changing.
All y’all with your special mics - stop it. They suck for us on the other side of the call. Just get a set of headphones with a mic built-in. Beats, AirPods, etc. y’all with your fancy mics have no idea how inconsistent and awful they are for us on the other end. I lose at least 10-20m of my week with people futzing around with their fancy mic. Stop it.
Again, separation of work space vs living space is paramount. You can poison your living space with all the positive and negative of work - it’s just hard to really let that stuff go without physically changing your environment. Polluting your living space with work will only work for so long.
Other than that, I wish I could express how rudimentary you can go and get yourself a really good and productive space.
FWIW, my keyboard is an old Dell, circa 2005 - still rockin - mouse, old Logitech (2007?). Desk is srsly just a jank folding table.
It’s definitely less about the toys you buy than the protection of your work space vs living space - and making sure your just plain comfy sitting for hours on end as you forget to take a break.
> Separate your space. Make sure your work and home environments don’t collide.
Depends on what works for you. For me it’s the exact opposite. I don’t think separating work and the rest of your life is natural or healthy way to approach things.
It feels really wrong to me to have these major parts of your life completely compartmentalized, not just in space but in time as well. For 8 hours a day I should only think about work, and ignore every other part of my life and vice versa?
For me the exact opposite works way better: I try go blend my work and my personal life as much as possible.
If I get stuck on something work related, I don’t stress out and try to push through it, trying to be productive because I’m inside this arbitrary 8-hour window. Instead I go do a chore around the house, get my mind off the problem. Usually this helps and gets me unstuck and I’ll continue with my work related things.
The reverse is also true: when inspiration strikes outside work hours and I just need to turn my idea into code, I’m not going to hold it in for hours (or even days if it’s a weekend) until it’s 9am on a work day, I’m going to grab my laptop and implement it right then and there.
I find trying to force myself into these time/space separated compartments for work an personal life extremely stressful. I’m actually one single person, this is not Severance. For me life/work balance means that these aspects of myself are balanced at all times, instead of switch between the two.
Totally agree on the fancy mics: even wireless hi-end bose headphones sucks.
Distance from mouth is the most important factor in voice quality, I've found that a cheap pair of headphones with buil-in stick mic sounded much better than a Yeti mic on the table.
It's quite easy to test yourself, but nobody does that: just record a test audio snippet using the OSX Notes app and listen to it yourself.
Yah I’ll pile on. Record yourself like you’re on a call and look at different things. Do some typing, do some on-a-call context switching and listen how awful it is. Then imagine network/VOIP - it’s only worse and most services even resample and do things like audio detection to avoid typing or other background noises. Your fancy mics all suck for this. In my experience anyway.
Other people have said, but I want to say it again; the chair. Oh yes, the chair.
But also what goes around it; if you get that wrong, you can have the perfect chair and not benefit from it. The chair is perhaps the starting point, but it's only one part of the whole system.
If where your feet go isn't comfortable, you'll sit on the world's greatest chair wrong. If the desk you sit at places the keyboard at a position that's not good, you'll stretch or compress your arms, or maybe the chair's armrests are in the way of your elbows or forearms and you're under constant tension all day as you work.
My feet don't rest on the floor; the desk has a little platform under it about five centimetres above the floor; that's pretty good for me. The desk has a sliding horizontal keyboard plate that puts the keyboard about 5cm above my thighs. When typing, I am in a little enclosure formed by the chair and sliding keyboard-shelf, which means my elbows are literally at the side of my hips and the base of my hands rest on the very top of my thighs. I can feel that my arms are very much in a relaxed state, and the natural curl this gives my hands is almost the same shape as they are when typing.
That's a lot of text about my specifics, but it's to push my point. It's not just having a great chair, a great desk, a great footrest (if that's your thing; I like my legs slightly extended, hence the raised plate to rest them on - some people like their feet placed firm to the floor). It's the whole combined setup allowing you to tune to your own human factors and ergonomics.
A cheap chair and cheap desk that allow you to sit and work just right for yourself is far better than an expensive combination that puts you under constant tension or stretch. It's better to spend the time to find a great setup for yourself than big money on items that individually are excellent but won't combine to be just right for you.
I am convinced that a good/great quality directional microphone with a pop-filter is a godsend for WFH. Here's why:
* Directionality matters because extraneous sounds in a home can be very distracting for listeners. For example, say the dishwasher is running. Or you answered a call before turning down the radio. Or a neighbor is mowing. Or, in a highrise, your balcony door is open.
* In conversation your semi-verbal cues like a tsk, a grunt, or an audible sigh can carry surprising weight. It's nice to know these can get through and convey how you feel without having to actually say it.
I consider my good microphone, mounted on an adjustable boom stand, complete with a pop-filter, along with some commonsense audio conveyance awareness, is my secret superpower.
I would recommend a dynamic microphone. Static microphones are more sensitive and ideal in a studio environment, which your home most likely isn't. I really like my SM58 (which doesn't need an extra pop filter), but there are many other options.
One thing to note is that dynamic microphones need to be right front of your mouth to be effective, that's the trade-off for being able to reject background noise. Which means that if you are doing video, it will be visible on camera.
- A pair of wireless headphones with good battery life
- A pair of wired earphones/headphones with an attached microphone in it for meetings
- An external camera for meetings, or if you have a spare phone you can use Camo (or iPhone's continuity camera) to stream video from the phone as a camera. When combined with a good phone stand, this setup beats most external cameras.
- A footstool/ottoman to rest your feet
- If you drink coffee, then experiment with and find good coffee beans that you would enjoy
- A desk placement that has you facing a window, this makes sure you can just look up to see outside and also keeps unwanted reflections on your monitor low
And of course a good desk and a chair. Search on FB marketplace for really good deals.
I have a treadmill that I added a desk to (scrap lumber that I velcroed to the handles), along with a 50” TV about 1m away that I use as an external monitor.
I get about 3-6hrs on the treadmill each day at about 2-2.5mph. I like using it much more than my standing desk. I find that I sleep much better now and have a lot more energy.
I have had been WFH since 2008 and I recommend adding a treadmill to whatever standing desk you choose. I also agree with keeping it cheap, unless you have a reason you cannot stand or walk I would skip the expensive chair. I have a cheap drafting chair I maybe sit in an hour a day, usually later afternoon. Otherwise I am churning 4-6 hours on the treadmill, walking feels loads better than standing. You can find a reasonably priced standing desk on Amazon for less than $200 and there are numerous options for treadmills now that can easily be moved from under the desk if you want. Just read the reviews, many of the desks on there are very sturdy. Also agree with putting your workspace away from where you mostly live. If you do not do this, you will end up working more than you should. The whole bro thing of hustling and putting work above having a life will just burn you out.
Use the tools that work for you and that you enjoy. I am rocking a Model M from 1987 and a Logitech trackball. I just use my airpods for meetings and like others said, test out how you sound. So many people come into meetings and their volume is either very high or very low.
Not quite wfh specific but as I was having to type and diagram more, I found an ipad, apple pen and nebo notes was an incredible improvement in my productivity.
I can easily share my ipad screen and draw like I would with pen and paper, and then save the notes to send or keep alongside code/docs.
Also being able to quickly handwrite notes and memos, double tap to transcribe, and then copy them to slack/notion/an email is awesome.
I will admit it feels like a bit of a waste of an ipad with that being its only function for me, but if anything in this setup broke I would replace it in a heartbeat.
Aside from the obvious good desk, chair and monitor(s).
I like a laptop, so a good dock is really nice to move between desk with full desktop experience and couch for more relaxed work.
Good headset or speakers+mic. Make sure the audio on calls is good. Especially if there’s noise around you really good headphones help so much. Sets with a good mic are harder to find. My QC35s were amazing but the mic picked up noise across the room. Noise cancellation meant I couldn’t hear the TV or family next door, but others on the call heard it very clearly. A good office headset like a Jabra works well here. A separate desk speakerphone unit can work really well here too.
Monitor mounts make a pretty big difference in terms of desk space and being able to reposition when sitting or standing.
I love my standing desk, but I found both the foot hammock and balance board to be amazing additions at relatively low cost for how much I love them.
A good webcam at a nice angle can be great compared to the laptop ones. It’s a lot more flattering and adjustable.
Get a mix of room lighting. A good room uplighter, ceiling dimmer, desk lamp, etc. having a mix allows you to feel a lot brighter and more active, or dimmed with a spot and focused, or generally dimmer and relaxed. Basically the opposite of very standard flat bright office tube lighting.
I really like my iPad Pro in addition to my laptop. It feels far more mobile, and is easier to task switch on for things like Slack, email, etc. with an MPB it’s a funky little extra screen too. It’s the first thing I grab when I just need email/slack updates, or when I need to go through docs and don’t want a full laptop. With the Magic Keyboard it’s usable and I’m always surprised how nice it is.
It’s funny, but the balance board makes it possible for me to stand for quite a while with no trouble. I think it’s because I’m constantly shifting my weight.
This is more general but if you end up going outside less then I believe Vitamin D3 helps with sleep and overall health.
More effective air conditioning/heating has been nice. Maybe a box fan to supplement if it's not always effective.
Weirdly my incredibly cheap Chromebook is preferable sometimes to the old laptop which is much better technically, because I don't have to worry about the battery and it doesn't heat up my lap at all and is quite light.
Make sure you are on Discord.
Having a reasonably priced VPS or two available for development is nice.
This is definitely not for everyone and not a purchase, but I don't have a car or drive anymore. It means I never have to stress about traffic and I feel like I save a lot of energy. I order groceries on Instacart. That does waste money but it's much less than people spend on transportation.
The thing that has made the biggest difference is just relocating to less expensive areas. That might not matter so much for highly paid HNers but for a few of us, cost of living is a big deal.
I found that I never used a standing desk when I had one, and the health benefits are dubious.
I bought a decent Microphone (jlab talk pro) and a $200 Webcam (Logitech brio 4k). Since all of my interactions are over Webcam I wanted to have something better than the default laptop Webcam. Also I do my work on a desktop
I would also recommend building a PC. I run several docker containers at once and the company issued MacBook pro is very sluggish with this. I built my own PC with lots of ram and (what was at the time) a good cpu.
Also, learn about different kinds of house lights (ambient, task, accent) and get some RGB LED light bulbs so you can control the light level of your home effectively. I have some Ikea lights which light up the whole apartment during the day, but if I'm up late working, I only have a warm LED light on a spring arm lamp over my desk that I use. Some people light to get lights that attach to their monitors and point at your desktop
Are they? Certainly if you stand still for hours I'd be skeptical for that, but while you are standing at your desk you are able to do all kinds of movements that you are not while sitting. And you are also not able to slouch (which I personally do like crazy after sitting for only a few minutes).
Anecdotally I've been using a standing desk for a couple weeks. For most of this year I've been having difficult sleep due to my back several days a week, but in the last week I haven't. Just generally my back has been fine, which I haven't been able to say for a while.
1-2 hours of walking every day and regular daily exercise (stretching in breaks + functional training) can solve the problem of pain in the back. You may also need to change your mattress or bed.
I took the time to run an Ethernet cable to my office and not rely on WiFi networks. Probably the best 30 mins I have ever spent in my work from home setup.
Also, a standing desk - but I only use it to vary the height just little bits while I sit…
A high resolution display that can show you text crisp and sharp.
Obviously I didn't get it new, but an 2nd-hand Apple Thunderbolt Display i got for what would be like US$400 has been incredibly useful for me in my graphic design work.
Not only that it has the auto-brightness adjustment and the color quality is superb, but has speakers, camera, mic, ethernet and USB ports, which are a nice thing to have - specially the speakers and mic are pretty good. I can't care less about refresh rate but its resolution (96ppi) make it ideal for me - a nice spot between "old" 72ppi and not having scaling issues with a 4K resolution whatsoever.
I got it to work with Linux with a HP Elitedesk 800 G4, a thunderbolt card they sell after purchase and the Thunderbolt3->Thunderbolt2 adaptor.
Just a caveat about the monitor arm. Purchase the strongest one you can find. There are few worse things in your working life than a constantly wobbly monitor.
Yes, that's true, for some situations it won't work. But the difference between an arm mounted to a wall or to a desk is huge. The amount of mass that the arm is attached to is pretty much proportional with the stability.
Upgrading to a WI-FI mesh that worked well for my home has had the largest impact for me. I've always liked to be flexible with where I'm working in the house but many spots had very degraded WI-FI signals. Working in the backyard on a nice day, going upstairs and doing some laundry while in a more passive meeting or temporarily changing my "office" are all fine from a WI-FI perspective now.
I've also picked up a standing desk recently. While it is too soon to say, I think I'm already seeing a positive impact on my back. Getting that ergonomic desk setup is probably the more universally helpful thing.
A good ergonomic desk/chair setup. Exactly what that means will depend on what works best for you (and remember that expensive doesn't always mean better).
A can of green paint. Seriously. I painted the wall behind me green. OBS studio does my pre-filter and keys well off the wall. Certain services (aws chime and Google talk on firefox), don't do virtual backgrounds and none of them frame the stream well. OBS+virtual camera does a great job!
Speaking of virtual background, I took a real picture of a real office. My virtual background looks natural and is not distracting.
On average I get a new one every 18 months apparently. Doesn’t seem like it, but my purchase history says otherwise…
2) Herman Miller Aeron Chair
3) OmniDesk Electric Standing Desk - 1.8m
4) Decent dual 4K displays
5) A purpose built home office
This should be number one, but it doesn’t count really.
We built our house with a studio / office a couple of years before the Pandemic.
Get three huge monitors (27-30") and put them in a big H on your desk, the leftmost and rightmost ones in portrait mode. Get a good keyboard, with full numpad. Get a good wired headset with boom mic, and run wired ethernet to the computer.
Get a good soft key light behind the desk, and of course a good chair.
Upgraded wheels for my desk chair. A lot of nicer chairs come with good wheels but not all. I bought replacement wheels that look like roller blade wheels and are a soft urethane type material. Unlike the plastic wheels, the new wheels do not scratch and wear my hardwood floors, even while dirty.
I have worked from home almost continuously since 2002 and have only the most basic home office. It’s the end of the utility room which I have divided off, just wide enough for my seat, too small for a ‘proper’ desk so I’ve mounted a sheet of plywood as a tabletop. It’s heaven.
This is often a point of contention within the remote work world, but I sit firmly on the side of "don't work from home all the time". To that end, the best purchase you can make is a co-working/shared office membership.
A good internet connection. I had troubles in the past and got a second internet line with LTE. I setup automatic fallback and never had problems since then.
Minimum desk height was the number one metric I looked at when purchasing a standing desk. Many did not go low enough for me to keep my keyboard a proper height while using my chair correctly. But I ultimately found one and I find the height adjustability more important than the standing.
About as usable as a 27" 4k monitor, you just need to mount it a bit further away from the desk than a normal monitor. I find it very useful, as now I can use the entire desk. With a 27" monitor, I have to place it right in the middle of the desk, rendering most of the desk unusable.
