Never has there been a prior event in recorded history when so many people worked from home, as during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the cost savings for so many companies, people continue to work from home even after the lockdowns lifted. This has had far reaching ramifications for “stay-cations” and home buying, where people from all walks of life desire to make their home more efficient and productive, as well as more of a haven or retreat.
While many people prefer to work at home, and not sit in traffic, the cruel flip side to the lockdown was the harmful effect it had on children, forced to go to Zoom School and not engage in important social development activities with others. No doubt, kids with better Feng Shui at home fared better than kids with poor feng shui environments.
With students of colleges and universities, the situation is a little different – although many subjects require the student to be in a classroom where there is all the necessary equipment, everyone has adapted to this. And the ability to do everything from one place gave students more freedom, in particular, for example, you can ask for help with assignments here https://mypaperwriter.com/buy-college-papers-online.htm, and devote the saved time to a specialized subject.
The home office can serve more than one family member, which sometimes includes parents in an income-earning capacity, as well as children sharing computers for school and entertainment. On a side note, the home office that is used for work purposes might even qualify for tax deductions. You may need to consult with a professional or, at the very least, know how to use a tax calculator. Regardless of how the home office is used, with Feng Shui principles in mind, there ends up being less distinction between the yin and yang nature of home vs. work/school environments.
How To Arrange a Home Office: Factors to Consider
One long standing Feng Shui principle for the office environment is not to sit with one’s back to the door. This is a legitimate recommendation because many people cannot focus or be as relaxed when there is commotion going on behind them. If you have co-workers walking into your personal office, it can be equally disruptive. However, with the home office, there is a limit to how many and who may enter the office room unannounced, so there is less of an imperative to limit the positioning of a desk to face a door.
Other priorities take the lead in using Feng Shui guidelines for office arrangements. While it is still ideal to face the room and have your back to a solid wall, (“The Command” position), it is NOT the most important recommendation to be made.
Location of doors, closets and windows may limit where to put a desk, but there is also a personal component you may take into consideration as well. Each person has good and bad personal directions based on their birth year. For one person, they may be very productive facing a certain direction, while another person may find that same direction to be draining or agitating.
We have to consider what a person is doing in their home office as well, to fine tune whether a person should sit with their back to a good personal direction (for support) or face their good personal direction (for better communication when sitting across from someone else). The back side of the body is considered “yin” and the front side “yang.”
Office Set-Up Based on Non-Obvious Influences: Using the Compass School of Feng Shui
In most cases, a home office is viewed as a miniature version of the whole house, like every other singular room. For example, using the Flying Star School of Feng Shui, we can determine based on year built and compass alignment, where the best locations are within a house for health matters, financial potential, and other important features. Let’s say that in a certain house, the Northeast sector is a major wealth area for the whole house. We can extrapolate from that: the northeast sector of every room is a smaller dose of that good energy. That might be one guiding principle in where one chooses to sit in a room for hours a day.
A concrete example of blending house with person: Let’s say that the northwest sector of the house has really good energy based on when it was built and the man working from home was born in 1975. For him, northwest is a major “wealth” direction on a personal scale. For that man to work in the northwest sector of the house and in the northwest sector of the room, it could be a win/win/win for him to make that area his office. If he were to face one of his best personal directions, like west, that could be the frosting on the cake. Personal best directions come from more than one school of Feng Shui and Chinese astrology; the Ba Zhai (Eight Mansion School) is the most popular in current times.
How to Prioritize All the Above Feng Shui Principles?
Different schools of Feng Shui and different consultants will have their own set of priorities, based on training and experience. For one consultant, they may make positioning yourself in your best personal directions over every other feature. For another consultant, he or she may want you to prioritize “qi flow” by sitting away from direct alignment with a door, whether you face the door or have your back to it. This same focus on Form School would not have you sit under an exposed beam or a lower part of the ceiling, regardless of whether or not it was a good direction for you personally.
As a consultant, I often make a mental checklist of pros and cons, or even a physical one for clients to review, when there are contradictions in how to set up an office. We often go with the arrangement that allows for most of the good feng shui principles to be utilized, such as good qi flow (air currents) and good personal direction, compared to micro-managing the room for its being a smaller version of the whole house. As a consultant for over 30 years now, I have used every tool in my toolkit to help people be more productive, healthy and successful, with the home office environment a space where we usually have more freedom to improve than the typical commercial space, including the very limited “work cubicle.”
What about Other Types of Distractions?
Is your office in a front bedroom where you are distracted by the goings-on up and downs your street and the sounds of traffic? Is your home office just steps away from the kitchen, with the constant lure of the refrigerator beckoning you to open it and say hello to all the food? Do you have to share the office with someone, thus never really having total privacy? Sure, there can be a lot of less-than-ideal circumstances which might undermine the home office experience and that can happen in a commercial environment as well.
One friend of mine used to work in a big building where the EMF’s (electric-magnetic fields) were off the chart. Being sensitive to EMF’s and RF’s (radio frequencies), she literally had to wear EMF shielding clothes and head covering in order to function at work. Without the EMF blocking accessories, she would become agitated, exhausted, and nauseous. This is just one example of a modern-day Feng Shui hazard, where we are all bombarded with wi-fi and 5G, but some people are more debilitated by it than others. One of the best office arrangements of all could be to position yourself as far away from your home router as possible and to work away from technological electrical devices for as long as possible each day.
And on that note, if your designated home office does not have good Feng Shui for one reason or another, you may also want to take breaks from being in that room, work outside in the backyard, an apartment balcony, or just take your cell phone and laptop to a more positive area of the house.
Conclusion
While it is not ideal to blend the home with work environment, practically everyone has succumbed to it these days. Even when we have a physical space outside the home to work at, people “take their job home with them” by being constantly available via their cell phone or home computer. Good Feng Shui is not just about how to arrange your all-consuming work space, but to actually strike a balance in your life between the extremes of yin and yang. With the addictive nature of social media and technology in general, the term “work-a-holic” is just as apt now as it was decades ago.
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Kartar Diamond of Feng Shui Solutions® has a full-scale consultancy, including assistance with property searches, design phase and existing homes and businesses. She is the author of three books, 6 ebooks, 36 Cast Study Lessons and more to come. See the books she’s authored or browse through her online Traditional Feng Shui school.