successful home working
Home workers' favourite things
Photos and text sent in by readers of the things that brighten their day
Home working pleasures – stationery
103 months ago
One of the joys of working from home is being able to use your own choice of paper and pens, and not the boring stuff somebody else doles out of the corporate stationery cupboard. I’ve always loved stationery – odd word – and browsing in shops that sell paper, envelopes, notebooks, diaries and so on.
I’m not quite sure what’s so attractive about it. Perhaps just as new clothes suggest new and exciting lives we could begin to live, blank pages offer the possibility of fearless business opportunities, bold new projects, and imposing order and discipline on previously shambolic habits.
Whatever, it matters a great deal to me that the pen I use feels just right, and writes right! My favourite ever since The BIG Jelly has been the stumpy green biros we gave out to delegates. I like its stubbiness and its cheerful green. The fact the writing proclaiming it to be a BIG Jelly pen wore off months ago bothers me not at all.
As for paper, I love spiral notebooks with a passion. I like the ease with which you can tear out a page to file it away or get rid of if the notes have now all been actioned. I always look for colourful ones and supermarkets are excellent sources, particularly at the start of school terms when there are special offers. If there’s anything better than a spiral notebook, it’s a bargain spiral notebook, and you can see one in this photo of my desk.
Next to it is the brown leather Filofax I’m still using since I bought it as a present to myself after the sale of my cleaning business. Every year at about this time I go hunting for exactly the right kind of diary to hook into it next year. It has to be a week on two pages starting on Monday – the ones starting on Sunday annoy me intensely. Everyone knows the working week starts on Monday. (Unless you’re a vicar, presumably). WH Smith is the best source, as they do their own version, which is much cheaper than the Filofax one and just as good.
Are you still using your BIG Jelly pen? What are your stationery loves and hates, or couldn’t you care less? Or maybe you are so tech-savvy you barely use pen and paper any more…
Top 13 tech tools for home workers, part 3
144 months ago
In the final part of her write-up of San Sharma’s Top 10 Tech Tools Francesca Geens of Digital Dragonfly describes San’s bonus, plus a couple of her own favourites:
11. iftt: San’s bonus to the list was completely new to me and a great little service that lets you automate various tasks. If This Then That lets you set triggers and actions. So if you would like to save the photo you take with Instagram to your Dropbox account you can. Simply look at their list of top automations to pick the ones that would save you time.
Personally I only use 4 of the above on a daily basis (Dropbox, Twitter, Buffer and Google Reader) so don’t feel overwhelmed if there are unfamiliar names on the list. Best to use just one effectively than set up accounts with lots and then loose track of what you are storing where!
I am all for keeping thing simple and try to use as little as possible to do what I need to do. The following 2 are essential daily tools for me:
12. Office365: this is how I manage my emails, calendar and contacts. Office365 is a recently launched service from Microsoft which offers Exchange Online to sync all your data across as many devices as you like. I have Outlook on 3 different laptops at home (all different sizes- I am in tech, remember!) and also manage my calendar, contacts and emails on my phone. Sometimes when I am working on the go I will borrow a laptop and access all my data through an Outlook browser app. Unlike everything on San’s list this one will cost you £4+VAT a month and is available for both Mac and PC users.
13. 1Password: another essential for me- password management software so you never need to remember your passwords. Sloppy password management will make you vulnerable to hackers so its important to keep strong and different passwords for everything. Spending some time setting up this software is a great way to protect yourself and save time from having to reset passwords when you can’t remember them! Again not a free one but in this case also worth paying.
I hope this list of 13 tools proves useful in saving you time – if there is anything we’ve left off the list leave a comment and let us know how you use technology to save you time.
Francesca Geens founded Digital Dragonfly to help tiny businesses with their IT and technology. She is especially interested in productivity and the use of technology to improve people’s day-to-day business lives, and is offering one of her unique Best-Practice Consultancy sessions for free every month to support individuals setting up their own businesses. Find out if you are eligible to apply.
Top 13 tech tools for home workers, part 2
74 months ago
Francesca Geens of Digital Dragonfly, non-geeky IT help for one man businesses, continues her summary of Top 10 Tech Tools, the recent How to Work from Home event:
6. Flow / Toodledo: I am a big fan of Getting Things Done by David Allen and ever since reading it use a task list to manage my business and personal to do’s. Personally I use Outlook tasks but both these apps are other great cloud based ways of tracking your tasks.
7. Twitter: We looked at a range of Twitter options from the ‘just’ Twitter’s own app to more complex apps like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. The latter are great if you need to manage more than one stream, if you want to schedule tweets or get analytics. Overall the preference fell for Hootsuite as being user friendly and having good looking interface. We also briefly discussed apps like Qwitter which let you see who unfollows you (might be best not to find out!) and Tweriod which lets you know when your followers are most likely to be online.
8. Buffer app: still on the subject of Twitter- whilst we all agreed that scheduling tweets needs to be done with care as it’s a good idea not to flood your followers with tweets. So if you are catching up on your reading send tweets to Buffer and let it automatically spread your tweets throughout the day. Since the workshop I have now added this to my Google Reader so I can tweet to Buffer straight from there: time-saving or what!
9. Basecamp: a great project management app from 37signals which has a free option giving your full functionality with a single project. So whether you are managing your wedding (as in San’s case!) or a client project another great way to keep everything organized and in the cloud.
10. Dropbox: Everyone attending the workshop was already using Dropbox though perhaps not to its full potential. This is a great way to work offline, backup to the cloud and get access to your work from any browser or other machine in which you log into your Dropbox account. I personally have saved all my business and personal documents to Dropbox (the free account is large enough for this) and can access them from 3 different computers that I work on, from any browser and from my phone- essential for any mobile worker.
San also had a bonus for us, plus Francesca has some favourites to add, so there’s still more to come soon! Have you tried any of these suggestions? We’d love to know how you got on.
Top 13 tech tools for home workers
114 months ago
As promised, here is Francesca Geens’ write-up of last week’s event and it’s so comprehensive I’m splitting it into 3 parts for easy reading!
Last week at Judy Heminsley’s regular ‘How to Work from Home’ workshops at Central we had a tech theme and San Sharma, Community Manager, from Work Snug and Enterprise Nation came along to talk us through his top 10 tech tools to save you time. As a few people couldn’t make it I promised to write it up and as I am in tech myself am going to throw in a few of my favourites at the end as well.
So what were San’s top ten tech tools?
1. Chrome: a good browser is really important. This one is quick, secure, has great add-ons and works across all platforms. Mac user should also check out Safari. Great tip: make sure you are making the most of tabs.
2. Instapaper: Save the shortcut button into your browser and whenever you see some great content you’d like to read later on send it to Instapaper for offline reading on your phone through the Instapaper app. Show You is a similar site for keeping track of video content you’d like to go back to.
3. Google Reader: RSS feeds are a great way to stay productive. Instead of visiting various sites to find relevant contents and news for your industry have it come to you through Google Reader. You can star items you want to save for later and also tweet straight from inside Google Reader (or post to other social media sites, including Buffer). Mac users will also like the aesthetic of Reeder- which also gives you the option to send to Instapaper.
4. Delicious: tagging bookmarks and saving them to your Delicious account is another way to save time by making it easy to go back to great content you come across but don’t have time to read or want to keep going back to. The social side of Delicious is not to everyone’s liking (ie you may not want to show the world what your reading) so note that you have the option to keep everything private. Either way you get to make the most of the great tagging facilities to easily find contents. More advanced users will want to check out the Stack feature.
5. Evernote: Another classic app which is available across platforms and which offers great ways to organize information. Especially useful when travelling or to keep track of receipts- send or scan information to Evernote, tag it or do a key word search and watch the character recognition at work.
To be continued – in the meantime, have fun experimenting and do let me know how you get on.
Do you have home office envy?
44 months ago
Some of the most popular pages on my website are the home office series, created from photos and text sent to me by readers about where they work at home. I’m now onto my third page of home offices and only one brave home worker has sent me a photo of his workspace in all its workaday glory, complete with cluttered desks and piles of paper.
The reply I usually get when I ask for a photo is “Not till I’ve tidied up!” When once I suggested an ‘authentic’ picture would be refreshing, the response was “You must be joking, I’ve got a professional image to maintain!”
Creating the pages has made me realize that not only are home workers avidly curious about where and how others work, we also tend to be sensitive about portraying our own as anything other than beautifully organized.
Since starting the pages I’ve also discovered other sites that showcase real home offices as well as some featuring aspirational and impossibly glamorous ones! I suppose these are the equivalent of sitting in your own rather scruffy living room while leafing through glossy magazine pictures of immaculate interiors.
It’s good to pick up ideas and see what’s possible, but I’ve stopped posting these pictures quite as frequently on my Facebook page. With their sleek desks, new Macs, minimalist accessories and lack of teetering piles of paper, they may be wonderful viewing, but the last thing I want to do is give the impression that a perfect home office is necessary for successful home working. It may not even be desirable.
Fortunately I’ve been introduced to the wonderful Pinterest, which allows me to indulge my vice by pinning my favourite pictures on to my own board and browsing other people’s.
Are you a sucker for these supermodels of the home office world, or do you take a determinedly pragmatic approach to your environment?
This post was first published on www.workshifting.com, the site for people who work out of coffee shops, hotels, airports and their homes every bit as much as the office.
Isolation – the biggest dream killer for home workers
912 months ago
I’ve worked from home for over 20 years and found that being able to pick and choose my time with other people suits my tendency to introversion. Despite being happy with my own company, however, I’ve always been surprised by how often I need to ‘top up’ by getting out and talking to others. But often I’ve abandoned plans for trips out because I felt I couldn’t afford the time or the expense involved.
I changed my mind recently, as I’m currently on Daniel Priestley’s Key Person of Influence programme and as a way of preparing for joint ventures and partnerships he encourages us to pick up the phone and invite someone we’d like to know to meet up for coffee. The people I wanted to meet are all in London so I went up for a couple of days – and lots of coffee!
I was blown away by how much energy and inspiration I got just by talking to people who have clever ideas and run successful businesses, and I’m sure the investment will repay me many times over. I’m so convinced of that I’ve made a resolution to repeat the trip regularly.
I was recounting all this to Nick Williams and he replied, ‘Ah yes, Barbara Sher says that isolation is the biggest killer of dreams.’ I had only vaguely heard of Barbara Sher, but those few words hit me right between the eyes.
It is a fact of life that left too long in its own company (and everyone has their own limit) the human brain seems to circle inward on itself, making horizons narrow and possibilities disappear. The danger is that the process is so imperceptible that you may not even realise it’s happening until something happens to bring you up sharp.
My resolution for 2011 is not to let my dreams be killed stone-dead by too much time on my own, tempting though that may be. They need to get out there just as much as I do, encounter other thoughts and ideas, and start to find expression in the big, wide world.
This post was first published on www.workshifting.com, the site for people who work out of coffee shops, hotels, airports and their homes every bit as much as the office.
