Creating a Motivating Workspace [+ Home Office Tour Pictures]

Staying motivated when your self-employed is so important because without motivation your business will tank. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been mindful of what type of things give me energy and what drains me. As you can imagine, this is mostly task-related, but I also found that my environment played a huge part in my approach to working. Moving around keeps my brain feeling sharp and stops me from procrastinating.

If I need to get my head down I’ll set up basecamp in a coffee shop. If I’m meeting clients or need some structure, I’ll use our rented office space (which we recently moved from a workspace in Newquay to a co-working office in Falmouth). But sometimes our home office is just the quiet space I need, away from the distractions of work-natter and coffee machines. It usually depends on my mood and what I’m working on.

We recently gave our home office a refresh and weaved our company branding throughout the design:

Our branding is playful and bold, so we decided to feed this into our plans when re-decorating. It was pretty daunting painting our stark white walls with bright blue paint but I feel like the risk paid off. We took our business cards into B&Q, they scanned it and then mixed up a tin of paint for us. Funnily enough, you can now waltz in and order ‘Float Digital’ blue paint. It was a little bit more expensive than buying paint off the shelf but we really wanted to make sure the paint was the right colour. It only required one coat, too.

Our 1-metre acrylic signage was custom made by the lovely team at the UK Sign Shop. They were so helpful in making sure the file was right and making sure we chose the right type of sign. It’s held on with super-strong tape but we squeeze a dollop of No More Nails just to be safe! It looks so great and really pulls together the rest of the orange stationery in the office. We also have a gigantic lifesaver buoy, as well.

At first, a couple of people commented on how having orange stationery might look a little garish. I could understand where people were coming from and I was pretty concerned with how it was going to look. Orange is a strong colour, especially when it’s contrasted against the blue. It isn’t exactly calming or tranquil, which is how I’d like to think the rest of our Scandi-style house is. But it felt like it was the right decision.

Surprisingly, orange accessories are considerably more expensive than ordering your basic black stapler or harddrive. I guess because fewer people want to buy bright orange stationery.

We’ve left plenty of white, with only one feature wall being blue, and there’s a 5ft floor-to-ceiling mirror which also breaks up the bold colours. Instead of being garish, the bright contrast is refreshing and motivating, which is something I hadn’t even considered when re-decorating. It really gives us a contrast from the rest of the house, so we can really close the door on work at the end of the day.

We’ve got a large double-desk that spans the length of the room with a clean white Ikea chest of drawers with a scanner printer on top. Everybody always asks what it’s like working with my husband, and I can honestly say with my hand on my heart, it’s the best. We bounce ideas off each other and I get to share my passion with my best friend. We ride the highs and lows of being self-employed together, and *touch wood* there’s a lot more highs than there are lows, so it’s pretty sweet.