Archive for December, 2009
The twilight zone
Dec 28th
This is a very peculiar time of year, a sort of twilight between Christmas and New Year in which nothing much happens. It’s a good time to do a clear-out of your home office ready for the new start after the January 1 Bank Holiday. I find jobs like getting rid of old paperwork are perfect for bridging the gap and making me feel ready for another year.
One thing I always do is go through my old diary and make a list of all the things I’ve achieved this year. It’s always far longer than I remember and makes me feel grateful for everything that’s happened, and positive about the future. This year’s list includes moving into a light and spacious house perfect for home working, the publication of my book, learning how to use Twitter, discovering Jelly and meeting some really helpful and inspiring people, including Mark Shaw (Twitter), Lee Cottier (coworking and Jelly) and Louise Billington (creative coach).
Next year will I hope include moving into another light and spacious house perfect for home working (sadly, our landlords have decided to sell up), developing some exciting products and services to help home workers be more successful, speaking to more groups about the joys of working from home and meeting yet more amazing people.
What do you want to achieve in 2010?
Closed for Christmas
Dec 24th
Last night we arrived home after a short visit to my parents in Lincolnshire. We managed to avoid the traffic hold-ups so many people have experienced due to the cold weather, accidents and number of cars on the road, but it was still an eventful trip.
We left at 7.30 on Monday morning after overnight snow, and the windscreen washer remained obstinately frozen for the first 80 miles, which meant several stops to wash away the mud and salt spray. I’d never have believed how happy I could be to see the first feeble drops of water spray up onto the windscreen! On the way back we drove through just about every kind of weather possible, from bright sunshine to freezing fog, rain and snow. To think we originally decided to make the trip then as the chances of bad weather are so much higher after Christmas!
I am about to close my laptop for the break, so it just remains to wish all home workers a peaceful and relaxing Christmas, followed by a happy and profitable New Year. Whole new decade in fact! We can take comfort in the knowledge we are well-placed to ride all the changes the coming years will bring.
C-c-cold at the computer
Dec 18th
Unlike the east of the country, here in the South West we’ve had no snow, but it’s been the first seriously cold day of the winter. Which means I have wrapped myself up in my home working winter wardrobe of fleece, down waistcoat, thick tights, jeans and sheepskin boots. And amazingly for me, I haven’t felt particularly cold at all, even though I’ve spent all day sitting at the keyboard.
We are lucky in that the room we work in is the warmest in the house. In previous houses I always seemed to end up with the coldest, but here the sun streams in during the morning and the heat seems to be retained. It’s also directly above the sitting room where the woodburner is and so gets the warmth from the chimney breast when the fire is lit in the evenings.
Lots of home workers complain about getting cold and I think lots of us feel uneasy about having the central heating on when we’re the only one in the house all day. For me, the sheepskin boots have been the key – warm feet keep the rest of me warm, it seems.
Another helping of Jelly
Dec 16th
Just doing some work on publicising the next Frome Jelly, which will be held on Thursday 7 January between 10 am and 2 pm at the same venue, The Old Church School, tucked away behind the Methodist Church on Butts Hill, just below the fire station.
Jelly is meant to be spontaneous and viral and is normally only announced a week or so before the date, but with the Christmas and New Year break fast approaching, it seemed best to let people know so they could put the date in their diary and plan accordingly. It would be sad if I left it too late and nobody turned up. Solitary Jelly would be no fun at all.
If you’re interested in setting up Jelly in your area and would like to know more, check out these videos and info.
Could you have a portfolio career?
Dec 15th
We are swapping books to check each other out more thoroughly and so I will report back in due course on Building a Portfolio Career, which I’m sure will be of interest to lots of home workers, present and prospective.
A little of what you fancy
Dec 14th
I’ve just been out for my daily walk to get away from the desk and do some little jobs, and it’s one of those dark, damp, cold winter days that seeps gloom and lethargy. Days like this always seem to make me hanker after a treat to eat. We have supper all planned, so a little something at teatime fits the bill. A little smackerel, I think Winnie the Pooh called it, but you have to be careful or after too many little smackerels you too will have a Pooh girth.
We are lucky in still having an M&S food store, always a good source of smackerels, so as well as the virtuous leek and cooking apple, my bag also contained an apricot pastry for A and a packet of chocolate rolls for moi. They cost the same, but the enjoyment in a pack of mini rolls can be strung out so much longer!
I have to buy my edible treats one by one, as anything stored in the cupboard simply cries out to be eaten. (Actually so did 2 bags of lovely German lebkuchen A had bought as gifts for friends. I promised to replace one I wanted to take along to a meeting with Louise Billington, my excellent coach. Rushing out slightly late, I forgot it, but then of course it was as good as mine and so I ate it later. And the other bag, because in for a penny…)
So to those people who worry that working from home will make them fat, I’d say that yes, you do have to be disciplined, but no more than you have to be working with other people who probably eat crisps, chocolate, biscuits and all that tempting stuff in front of you and ask you out for coffee and drinks. Just don’t stock up with your favourite indulgence at the supermarket – you might save pounds in one sense but you’ll gain them in another!
Newsflash – page about Jelly
Dec 9th
I’ve just added a new page about Jelly that includes a couple of videos from the first Frome Jelly in November. New pages are listed under Tips on the menu bar and also in the right-hand column under my tweets.
How work is changing
Dec 8th
There were the usual stories of people who used to have to go to an office but can now work abroad or from their garden sheds, but what caught my attention was the question of how we avoid a two-tier society when essential services still have to be supplied by people who can’t work at home and often have to work long, anti-social hours in unpleasant conditions.
I feel that really needs addressing now, and maybe there will be some pointers in the book written by Richard Donkin, who was the major contributor to the programme. It’s called The Future of Work
and will be fascinating to compare to American Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation.
What particularly bothers me is that government and the law seems unwilling or incapable of keeping up with the changes in the way people work, which after all don’t happen overnight but over a long period of time, but more about that another time.
Ooh err, I wonder what that does…
Dec 6th
I’m like a child with a new toy – I keep coming back to my new site to admire it and play around some more, and I’ve found some more new features you might like:
If you run the cursor over the top right-hand corner of the site, where it’s completely black/purple, a couple of little squares drop down. One is to change the size of the font so you don’t strain your eyes using a laptop, the other lets you widen the page.
You might have noticed the comments are now at the top of each post. Click on Comments and run your cursor over the person’s name, and if they have a website, a little screenshot of it pops up so you can see if you want to have a closer look. (Sorry, Jenny, I don’t know why yours is blank).
Above the comments is a heading ‘Share this post!’ and if you hover over it, it goes blue and brings up links to Twitter, Facebook and other social media so you can share the info if you think other people would find it useful.
Apologies if you know all this already. I do lots of surfing and a lot of it is new to me, so I just couldn’t resist sharing!
The new look Work from Home Wisdom
Dec 4th
Welcome to the new look Work from Home Wisdom! It’s taken rather longer than I anticipated to get here, but I hope you like the new style and layout as much as I do. Now that my blog is on the home page, there will be something new to read, listen to or watch every time you visit.
Have a click around and explore all the new features. In the right-hand column below my book is a row of little icons that allow you to search blog posts by category, tags, archives, favourites and recent comments.
Under these is a search box where you can type in a word to bring up all the blogs that mention it. Below you can see my latest tweets and click on the links to follow me. Oh, not to forget that there’s another link to my twitter account tucked under the menu bar at the top of the page, next to an RSS button. Clever stuff, eh?
And this is just the start. From next week I will be adding lots of new information to help you work from home as happily and profitably as possible, with articles, audio, video and links tailored to all kinds of home worker.
Whether you are downsizing, making changes after redundancy, writing from home, a mum returning to work, living in the country, interested in making some income in retirement or any other kind of home worker, there will be something of interest for you. Happy browsing and do come back soon!
