The New Feng Shui Home Office

Remember those first cell phones we called ‘bricks’ for their bulky size? How about the first portable PC, laptops that were really too heavy to comfortably carry (or work with one on your lap for any length of time, for that matter). They were supposed to make our offices portable – and they did, if you are thinking large, heavy briefcase.

With the portable devices like tablet PC, iPads and smart phones do we even need home offices anymore?  A comfortable armchair, a coffee shop, the library - can those be our office? Almost everything we need to work can be carried in our pockets, handbag, or knapsack and used pretty much anyhere, if internet connection isn’t a top priority. And even that it becoming much easier to come by.

I am writing this post on a tablet, a new addition to my office tools. I am a happy owner of a Blackberry Playbook and am getting used to using it for more than an ereader. My biggest complaint is that as a touch typist, the keyboard slows me down. I can go much faster on a full sized keyboard – with fewer typing mistakes.  I could get an external keyboard but then,  that is one more thing to carry when I am working away from home. Unless I can get a keyboard that folds up (they do make them) my office in my pocket theory is out the window. How quickly we adapt and then become spoiled.

My regular ”office” – my laptop - is temporarily out of commission, suffering from space issues. Every so often it grinds to a standstill and programs hang and quit. Free up more disk space it cries, and please stop running every program at the same time. My husband the computer specialist was tired of hearing my complaints (and my worries about losing data) and gave me a new external hard drive – one that is large enough for all my projects. That is it in the photo above, the red box.

My job today is to take all my files off my laptop and copy it to my new drive. My laptop is being space cleared – literally – or will be once I reboot. Deleting all those files gave it a temporary memory overload, but when I am finished, my laptop will be like a blank note pad, a cleared off desk, ready for my day’s work. I like that concept very much.

At the same time, I have been reading with interest people’s projects to go laptop free with a tablet, and maybe even office free.  I know I will always want to have a printer but my printer is wireless and isn’t even in the same room as I work. It could go anywhere. I just realized that getting my files free from my laptop is a big step towards going office free. There is a step missing though as I still need my laptop to talk to my tablet, to transfer files between them. I will figure it out, if I want to.  It actually wasn’t my goal to become laptop free. I was looking at the various ereaders on the market and figured for a little extra money I could get a device that does a whole lot more than read books.

I am not advocating this as The  Answer for a feng shui office, or that it is is for everyone, but it does put a different spin on a feng shui work space, the idea that we needn’t be so physically tied to one space. And it makes sense from a feng shui point of view to look beyond the environment to the tools you used to work on. If they are not working properly, the most gorgeous decorating, furniture or view isn’t going to make the energy flow in a feng shui sort of way. I paid attention to my environment but put up with a clogged up computer. 

As with all new techcnology there are pros and cons. One concern I have with both my tablet and hard drive is losing them. How are the files on those devices protected if they become damaged or lost? To be truly office free I guess one uses an online service for backing up and storing files. Ideally we are backing up our computer files regularly anyway, right? I remember to do it when my computer begins behaving oddly. There is nothing like a few ‘blue screens’ to put fear into you. I will probably continue to use an external drive and be more diligent about backing it up. We’ll see how that goes!