Which Way Should Your Work-From-Home Desk Face?

Both are good directions (दिशा, disha) to work facing, and the usual distinction is the kind of work rather than the person.

North is the conventional choice for anything financial — sales, negotiation, client work, accounts, anything where money moves. East is the traditional direction for study, learning, writing and work that needs sustained concentration. If your week contains both, pick the one that matches the work you find hardest, because that is the work the arrangement needs to support.

The most common mistake in a home setup is not the direction faced but the back. Desks get pushed against windows because that is where the light is, which leaves the worker with an open window or an open doorway behind them.

A solid wall behind the chair is the traditional arrangement and the one people report noticing fastest. It is not only symbolic — a back to an open door means every movement in the house registers in peripheral vision, and attention goes with it.

In a Mumbai one or two-bedroom flat this is often the only option, and the honest answer is that it is not ideal but it is workable.

The problem is not the room, it is that sleep and work end up sharing the same few square feet, so neither gets a boundary. The arrangement matters more here than anywhere else.

Sitting directly under an exposed beam is avoided in Vastu, and in a flat with a false ceiling the beam is often there but hidden. If you know one runs over the desk, shifting the chair a foot or two is usually all that is needed.

The same applies to a loft or heavy storage directly overhead. Where it cannot be moved, the usual remedy is to lighten what is stored there rather than to rebuild anything.

A few conventions are worth knowing, mostly because they happen to match how people work well anyway.

Keep the area directly in front of you clear enough to actually use. Heavy items, books and equipment go to your south or west. Water — a glass or a small bowl — belongs to the north-east, though keep it away from cables and sockets for obvious reasons. Anything to do with money, including files and the card reader, sits to the north.

In a typical one-bedroom flat, a workable setup usually comes from two or three small moves rather than a perfect room. Here is a common case.

The only free wall is under the bedroom window, so the desk faces the window towards the west, with the bedroom door behind the chair and the afternoon sun glaring across the screen by four o'clock.

The better arrangement in the same room is to turn the desk so the chair backs onto the solid south wall and you face north, with the window now to one side. The glare goes, the door is no longer behind you, and the window still lights the desk. A small lamp handles the evenings, the router and chargers move to the south-east corner of the desk, and a box under the desk takes the papers at night. Nothing is drilled or rebuilt.

Natural light from the north or east is the traditional preference and also the most comfortable to work in, because it does not move across your screen through the day the way west light does.

The common error is a single overhead ceiling light and a bright screen in an otherwise dark room, which is both poor Vastu for the zone and hard on the eyes. A lamp on the desk, and something lighting the wall behind the screen, fixes both at once.

You may also find these useful: Vastu for Office Desk and Cabin: Seating, Direction and Placement and Vastu for Freelancers and Creators: Setting Up a Home Workspace.

Ask for a review when you have tried the basics and the space still does not work for you, when you are deciding which room to turn into a home office, or before you buy furniture for a new flat. A desk position is far easier to plan on paper than to change once the cabling and shelves are in.

Dr. Kimaya Parikh-Ambekar reviews home offices online from a floor plan, a few photographs and compass directions, which suits most work-from-home setups, and on site across Mumbai from her Andheri East office. She also travels for site visits elsewhere in India and abroad, arranged on the free first call. The review looks at the whole flat, not only the desk: the room you work in, what sits behind and above you, the light, and how work is kept apart from sleep. Remedies are non-structural and come in a written report. If you are going online, this checklist shows what to keep ready.