If you have the opportunity to design your own office you want to take the time to think about what you need versus what you will be stuck with. Although everything in your office can be replaced the reality is that once you put that office together you are pretty much stuck with it. So choose wisely.

Here you’ll find a series of articles that discuss different aspects of the office (primarily the home office). You may find inspiration for your dream office. I have been searching for my own dream office for 40 years. It’s not getting any easier to find it but I am getting closer. I figure I’ll get it right sometime in the next 40 years or so.

A good office provides you with sufficient space to accomplish many tasks without swallowing you up. If you have to put several people into an office together it’s probably better to keep the middle of the room clear and have everyone face the wall. While this might seem counter-intuitive at first I have found (through experience at arranging and rearranging offices) that it increases productivity without destroying the connection that some people need.

When you have people sitting with their backs to the wall and their desks jutting into the center of the room maneuvering around the jungle of furniture, waste cans, and chairs becomes an aerobic workout that many visitors are not prepared for. Shared offices should be arranged with the idea of allowing free movement of people.

A private office can be set up around the personality of the occupant. One man I worked for had a very dark office. He had plenty of windows but he kept them covered up with drapes. I always felt like I was sitting in an old mobster movie late at night, discussing secret, secret things.

I once had an office with a glass front wall. Everyone walking by could see me at work (or play). The only window I had was a small, thin sidewalk-view at the top of the back wall. It’s not that I was in the basement. I was just on the lower floor of a building that was built into a hillside. Since my office was toward the back of the building most of my back wall was buried.

In an office with a glass front you position your desk between yourself and the door so that you have a sense of barrier or protection. However, if the office is relatively narrow (as mine was) that leaves you with hardly any room to walk around the desk. I could have positioned the desk differently but needed that layer of psychological defense.

In another job I once held we all had those classic mile-high cubies crammed into a semi-large space. Four people got corners and I was stuck with the only “in-between” cubie. Oh, I had plenty of privacy — even a window — but I still felt like the junior member of the team (which I was). As soon as one of the corner cubies became available I launched myself into it. Ah! Privacy! Prestige!

Another time I shared an office with 1 guy and we both had doors. We were given a little divider to put between our desks, so my desk faced my door. He, oddly enough, put his desk up against a wall so that he could see out his door (that was the only way it would work). We had a fabricated sense of space that was enhanced by our meeting schedules; we were rarely scheduled in the same meetings together.

The most uncomfortable offices for me are the big, open environments with 12-20 people are crammed together in half-cubies. I have worked in a couple of jobs where that was the style. I understand the egalitarian nature of the layout but nonetheless it’s not very productive. If everyone were handling money or doing something hyper-sensitive I could understand the openness, but the sense of being under constant scrutiny was annoying (and that was really only the case in one job, not the other).

If you want to suck the life out of your employees, treat them like machines in a factory and put them all in rows and columns like a matrix. They’ll dread coming to work and look forward to every break and meeting that gives them an excuse to get out of that huge open cavern. Business people often complain about having too many meetings to be productive — frankly, I found that the meetings were often an escape from the doldrums of being a sheep in a pasture.