Notes on Working from a Spare Room
Six years in, a few small things I would have told myself at the beginning.
By Priya Banerjee · Apr 10, 2026 · 6 min read
I have been working out of the smaller bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment in Oakland since March of 2020, which means that I have, at this point, spent more of my professional life in this room than in any office I ever rented a desk in. A few things I have learned, none of them revolutionary, all of them, in retrospect, the things I wish someone had told me at the beginning.
The first is that the door is the entire game. If the room has a door that closes, you can work from home indefinitely. If it does not — if the desk is in the corner of the living room, or at the kitchen table — the arrangement will, eventually, eat you. It is not a matter of discipline. It is a matter of architecture.
The second is that the desk should face away from the door, not toward it. This is counterintuitive and I will spare you the reasoning, but trust me: a desk facing the door turns every passing footstep into a small interruption. A desk facing the wall, with the door at your back, is a desk you can actually work at.
The third is that you should leave the apartment every day, ideally before noon, ideally on foot, ideally for something that is not an errand. A walk to a coffee shop counts. A walk around the block counts. A walk to nowhere in particular and back counts the most.
