All About Getting Your Home Office Set Up (So You Can Stay Home During the 2010 Winter Games)

In part 1 of the Vancouver Observer Telelympics Tutorial, I talked about setting the stage for working at home during the Olympic games. Here in part 2 we're going to roll up our sleeves and get stuff in place and working. We've got a little over a month to go before the throngs pack our fair city to the gills, so time is of the essence.

Because working out the software bits might get a little detailed, I'm going to stick to hardware and office set up for the most part, next week we'll get geeky with it and set up some software to help you collaborate with your co-workers and the rest of humanity while you live in Olympic exile for a few weeks.

(Side note: In all honesty, I'm not going to completely hide out during the games. I have been practicing my German and Spanish to help travelers and look forward to some parts of the experience.)

Get that home office in shape!

You're going to be spending a lot of time at home in your "home office" if you're telecommuting. If you don't have a regular office at home you're going to have to make do with what you can put together. If you do have an office in your home, now is the perfect time for a few upgrades. Let's start from the bottom (literally) and work up, shall we?

Get. A. Good. Chair. Seriously. Spend the bucks and get a descent chair. Go to Staples, Ikea, wherever and try a few out. One of the things I learned the hard way is that being cheap on your chair doesn't pay off at all. The next thing not to skimp on is, you guessed it, your desk. Okay, if you're only doing this work at home thing for a short bit a fancy shmancy computer desk, but you do need a good place to work. Part of the whole thing about a computer desk is that it should be at the right height so you can type and work and not lose use of your arms and neck after an hour or two. I use an external keyboard and mouse (on a keyboard tray) combined with a stand to raise my laptop to the correct height. This is one flaw in computer desks (one I hope Ikea or someone will fix soon)—they were all made of to have monitor on the desk and a big desktop computer below. The problem is that laptops are outselling desktop computers 2 to 1 right now (even though I'd really love a 27" iMac) so lots of people are working in pretty bad situations.

According to ergonomic experts you should be sitting something like this:

The key is relaxed. Arms relaxed, head relaxed and not looking up or down more than is natural or comfortable. It has taken me years of being cheap and making due before I sucked it up and bought the right stuff so I was comfortable at my desk. I'm going to save you the trouble. So here is the office list:

Good chair

Good (sturdy) desk

If you have a laptop get a stand, riser or similar to lift it off the desk to be used with an external keyboard or just lift it up enough so that it stays cooler and is more comfortable to type on.

Good lighting. Friends don't let friends squint.

I like to use an external keyboard and mouse. I happen to be using the Apple aluminum wired keyboard and new Magic Mouse right now. Both are just awesome. I love the keyboard and the mouse is just … wow. I am a real keyboard snob. Hey I write for a living, I like to have a keyboard that is good, solid and comfortable. If you're going with the external keyboard or your desktop computer's keyboard is due for replacement, shop around. Try the keyboards out. Don't go for looks or features, go for key feel and comfort. I like ergonomic keyboards a lot, and only stopped using the one I had because it wasn't entirely OS X compatible. I chose the wired version of the Apple keyboard over the wireless one because I found the wireless one to be a little too cramped for my hands and fingers (I have pretty big fingers so I like a little extra room between the keys).

Have a place to work? Hmm, right where is the best place to work? I have one word for you: doors. The best home offices have doors. It's not being antisocial to your family to close your door, it's a fact of life. You have to concentrate. You have to take phone calls. Closing a door is a good thing, a very good thing. If you can't close a door, see if a room screen might work for you. If you're really stuck for space, sure the kitchen table will work for a while (I've done it), but it isn't great (and believe me getting syrup off keyboards is no fun).

Now let's talk Internet access. In part 1 I told you that high-speed Internet access is a must-have to work from home, now we're going to step it up to get a router and wireless access set up in your house. Why bother with a wireless router? Convenience and safety. Convenience should be obvious, with WiFi at home you can move around the house as you need to and have people come over to work with you and you don't have to run extra cables around (believe me that's a royal pain). This is going to sound like I'm an total Apple fanboy, but I have a pair of Apple WiFi routers here at home. Why two? Because I have three floors! Let me explain.

WiFi is just like the technology in cordless phones (in fact they often share the same spectrum 2.4 GHz) and because of that it has limits. I won't bother quoting all the stats on the effective range of various protocols (a, b, g, & n) because in the real world they don't mean very much. In your basic, single-level apartment or home, a single router is going to work just dandy. Yes, there will be some dead spots, especially if you have an older home with wire-reinforce plaster and lathing walls (chicken wire absorbs WiFi effortlessly and completely), but by and large you're good. Part of the trick to having great coverage in your house is where you place your router. I prefer a central location in the house and up high, that however isn't always possible. If nothing else shoot for central. So why do I need not one, but two, routers? Because I have my router in probably the least central location in the house. The router is in my office, in the basement. This is because I need the router hooked up to my laser printer to share on the network. Uh huh. This means that the signal on the third floor is less than stellar. Okay it often rots. Doesn't matter that I'm sitting not only directly over my office and close to the outside wall, because between me and my router is WiFi's other nemesis: glass. Yeah. So I have my AirPort Extreme router in the basement, connected to my cable modem and serving my print to the whole network, and an AirPort Express on the third floor replicating and expanding the network. Yes, I might move it to the second floor, but for right now it's doing great. Wherever you are in my house you get strong, powerful WiFi.

Setting up routers has gotten very easy and if you buy a name-brand router you're going to be fine. Why did I choose Apple routers? When one of my routers started to go flakey (I still have it as a back up) and I had a new computer with the latest WiFi hardware, I asked for opinions and sure enough, the AirPort Extreme is an awesome router.

Okay so convenience is great, but safety? Yep, because all routers you're going to pick up include a hardware firewall (that only means that it's built into the chips) to protect your network from outsiders. This augments the security the software firewall built into Windows or OS X provides. Even if you don't want to wander around the house connected to the Net, just having the additional barrier keeps the huns at bay.

Believe it or not, that is going to cover most of the tech for working at home. Printer? I have too many and I often wonder if one could get by without one. If this is going to be just a short experiment with telecommuting, don't bother getting one if you don't already have one.

Phone? That's going to be interesting, I don't have a landline anymore so my cell is my phone. So my "office phone" is always with me. In the next column I'm going to talk about the joys of Skype and GoogleTalk so we can go through the merits of off loading some of your voice calls to computer based then.

What's left? Human contact.

You know that stereotype of the geek living in his parents basement with skin so pale that you doubt it's seen sun in a decade? Yeah, that isn't a good thing. Trust me on this. When I haven't been out and about for a day or so I get a little wonky. But if you aren't going into an "office" where do you go? Your "third place." The "third place" is a newish idea that refers to that intermediate not-home, not-work place … but in-between. These places are better known by their common name: coffee shops. Find one close to you with good coffee, free WiFi, good seating and plentiful power outlets. It doesn't hurt to find a backup either. I have a couple 24 hour places near me that I sneak into to work a bit, chat with friends, etc. Often it's nice to just meet friends and share a table while working. You don't have to talk, just being with other humans is a good thing.

The next installment we're going to get geeky with it and load up some cool software that makes life working from home cool and fun. Related to that, I've been wondering if a teleworking workshop would be something people would like to attend. Show you how to set things up. Test out software and hardware…let me know in the comments when you think.