When writing, coding or working through issues, a proper environment to engage your brain in such an activity is important. Optimizing such an environment conducive to maximum productivity at home is no easy task.
For the most part, I am lucky to live in a quiet neighborhood. Thankfully, those outside the house factors where I have limited control are minimized save a few noisy car exhausts from time to time.
Within my house, I get the best time to myself after everyone goes to bed. The wife and kids are resting peacefully in their beds and I get a moment to process my thoughts from the day and can take a crack at doing something creative with my time. Sometimes, I just want to veg and play video games after work until I am ready to go to bed. I believe the best thing to do would be to go to bed at the same time as everyone else and just wake up earlier when the house is still. I find that I am my best when I fresh after a good nights sleep. Either way, my family has dibs on my attention while they are awake and stirring about.
Gear wise, I have an HP Envy X2 detachable laptop that I absolutely love using for the purposes of writing. I can pretty much get the battery life to last about 2 days or so. This means, that I can write just about anywhere and not worry about finding a power outlet. I even use this laptop to charge my power hungry iPhone. Unfortunately, they no longer sell these units and it would be hard to replace something so amazingly fit for this purpose.
I rarely use my desk at home anymore where my desktop PC resides. I may game on it or work on a school paper from time to time. I pretty much setup anywhere around my house that strikes me as comfortable at the moment. I will write from my couch, kitchen table, plotter table or just lie in bed like I am doing right now.
Honestly, I am not sure how I would be able to work from home if I worked remotely. I think the best way for me to be free of distractions would be to go rent some office space or work at a co-working place. It is awesome that people can go to coffee shops, but to me there is still too much going on there. I would still get very little done.
I took this moment while my family went out this evening to enjoy the calm house with my fuzzy Shih Tzu dog Izzy is lying next to me to crank this out in response to Day 3 of the 10 Days to a Better Blog course with John Saddington @saddington over at Desk.pm community site. For the time, this is my ideal environment to be creative, code or write.
I respect that everyone has different places they find they are the most creative, what is yours?