We have a small room in the house that was classified as a bedroom but it’s quite tiny. You certainly can’t fit bed in there but it’s perfect for a study or home office.

That room was where we used to go into once in a blue moon to sit at the computer and check emails and pay utility bills. However, ever since about 2014 when I started my own freelance business then of course, joining a company where the majority of time, I worked from home, I think I’ve spent more time in there than any other room in the house.

Over the years, I have changed the configuration of the room countless times and lost track of how many hours I’ve been in there. It’s a room that has bright light in the mornings, faces the street so I could look out at who passes on the footpath and watch deliveries come. It’s also the hottest room in summer and the most cold in the winter.

It’s not perfect but it’s functional. Other people have less so I’m not complaining.

In the past, I loved going into that room. A place where I could start my work day and then in the afternoons, close the door to signal it’s end.

Now, this study or home office throws up different feelings. During the weekends and after work hours, I physically can’t make myself go in there.

I have my French studies to do and technically I should be doing them from the home office but I have such a feeling of dread to go into that room on my days off that I prefer to do my studies anywhere but there.

I don’t know why my behaviour has changed so much over the last few years when it comes to this room but I think possibly, it’s how my mental relationship with work has changed since that time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be in there on my work days but I absolutely do not need to be in there any other time. It’s like I’ve reached this point that the room is the physical “personification” of the office.

We don’t need to go into our physical office on weekends and days off, so why should we enter that room in the house?

In order to overcome this feeling of dread going into that room, I’ll have to completely redesign that space in years to come when I decide to stop working. I wonder what that space may become. I’d like to fill it up with my yarns and projects, and toss out (or burn) all business, leadership, learning, marketing books and tax folders forever.

I’m surprised at how much one space – one room – started to be so important to me as an office – a place of work to now being one where I just don’t want to go into anymore.

Something in me has just “switched”. I’ve often mentioned that these last few years has created a total mindset switch when it comes to career, work and professional life but that escalated mostly in the last year. I do feel that I’m in some kind of transition and I see elements of it playing out in other areas in my life – such as representations of work in physical spaces like this room. It’s odd, bizarre but all I can do is to continue to observe, reflect and try to understand it as a way of it being some kind of life change.