New technology and changes in the economy have transformed the world of work. A significant portion of the workforce now telecommutes, and around 12% are freelancers, working out of their home offices. Setting up a home office is an important task. Assigning yourself a quiet place to work, with the right furniture and equipment, can be essential for productivity. Desks, ergonomic office chairs, proper lighting, and office desk floor mats can all help to create the right ambience. Once you have all of these in place, all that?s left to do is to plug in the coffee maker and get to work.

Who invented the office chair?
Office chairs may well be the most important item of office furniture. For people who spend hours at a desk every day, chairs must be designed to provide both comfort and support. Chairs have been around for five thousand years, or so the archeologists tell us. The ergonomic desk or office chair, though, is a fairly recent invention.
Its inventor was none other than naturalist Charles Darwin, who put wheels on an armchair, so he could move around in his study while working. This was in the 1840s, when he was done with his travels, but needed to spend hours studying the specimens he had collected. With the advent of office work in the late 19th century, the idea of an ergonomic chair on wheels quickly became popular. Technology caught up with chair design in the twentieth century, giving us the office chair as we know it today.

Setting up a home office
If you?re part of the workforce that?s plugged into the new economy, meaning that you either telecommute or work as a freelancer, you probably have set up some kind of a home office. And if you haven?t yet, you should. The good part of being able to work at home is that you miss out the commute (think icy roads in winter) and the office politics. The difficult part is disciplining yourself to set aside six to eight hours a day for work, free of distractions.
That?s the key phrase right there: free of distractions. It?s best to assign a separate room, or at least a separate space, where you are committed to your work. At home, it?s all to easy to be distracted by chores, tv, kids or pets. When you enter your home office, you?re consciously separating yourself from these, for a few hours. The kids and pets will probably be glad of some time to themselves, too.

Basic furniture for the telecommuter
The basic office furniture that you?ll need is a desk, chair, lighting and a thick chair mat. While thick chair mats may not seem like an important item, you?ll find them invaluable in preserving the appearance of wood floors and carpets. Without office desk floor mats, the wheels of your chair will mark, scratch and score wood floors. They will also scuff carpets and be difficult to move across carpeting in any case.

You can get custom chair mats to cover exactly the area necessary. Over time, they will become as indispensable to you as Darwin?s wheeled chair was for him. Office desk floor mats provide the finishing touch to a home office, letting you access all of your workspace while preserving your floors and carpets. And finally, one piece of equipment that?s as important as office mats: the coffee maker. Plug it in and you?re good to go.

Working from home can be a privilege and a challenge. Setting up a home office with proper furniture, including a desk, ergonomic chair, lighting and office desk floor mats, can put you in the right frame of mind for work.