successful home working
Resources
Information on people, books and new pages to help home workers
3 more great free resources for home workers
9
The other day I mentioned three good quality freebies that will appeal to all kinds of freelancers and home workers. Today I have another selection to ease the pain on your wallet at this expensive time of year. See what you make of these:
For writers – I’m a great fan of Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art and highly recommend it to all home workers. We’re more likely than most to suffer the pains of procrastination and resistance, and this little book is a great help in kicking them into touch and getting on with the job.
Pressfield’s Writing Wednesdays are a weekly feature on his site, and get into the nitty-gritty of producing good writing, in both the practical and inspirational sense.
For home workers on the move – the WorkSnug App is a free tool for finding the nearest and best places to do some work when you’re out and about in the city, wherever you are in the world. Thousands of cafes, coffee shops, co-working spaces and libraries have been reviewed and rated for their atmosphere, WiFi, noise levels, power provision, even the quality of the coffee!
For anyone trying out coworking or thinking of opening their own coworking space – the authors of Working in the Unoffice are offering a sample of their book, which includes masses of tips for getting the best out of collaborative workspaces.
Are there any free resources you would recommend to fellow home workers?
Spreading a little Commentluv between home workers
10
My partner and IT adviser A is always spotting new ways to improve our blogs and on his suggestion I’m trying out Commentluv. (I know the name alone will offend those of you who, like me, try to maintain standards of spelling and grammar in the face of the txting masses, but let’s try to put that to one side!)
The good thing about Commentluv is that it allows you to link to a post on your site when you leave a comment on mine and add my post to Google+, like it on Facebook or tweet the link.
So you are adding to your backlinks, which helps with your SEO, especially as this blog has a Page Rank of 4 (and rising!) Other visitors might check out your blog for themselves, especially if the selected post is related. So you benefit both from improved SEO and from extra visitors.
There are 3 boxes to fill in with your name, email address and website (put ‘http://’ in front). You type your comment in the large box as usual, click on the title of the post you want to link to, check the box to confirm you’re not a spammer (the cheek) and post the comment.
Underneath your comment is an invitation to read your selected post, next to a little red (luv?) heart. Hover over the heart and a box appears with links to more of your posts. There are other features too, but I think that’s quite enough to get your head round to start with.
Confused? Check out A’s post about Commentluv and have a look at the comments beneath before you have a bash yourself. And of course let me know if you luv it, or not.
3 great free resources for home workers
24We all like the odd freebie, don’t we? I do anyway – this cute little wallet came from a free icon download site. The problem comes when it’s more than a little taster, because human nature seems to prevent us placing any value on something we haven’t paid for. Pay even a small amount, however, and we’ve literally invested something so commitment is higher.
Having said that, giving away a free sample to show the customer the quality and value of your product or service is a technique as old as the hills. I used to have a free report on this site about overcoming isolation when working from home, and I’m working on another about the things people never tell you about home working.
I’ve come across other examples in my trawls through the internet, provided by suppliers of excellent goods and services, and here are my first three:
1. Francesca Geens of Digital Dragonfly IT support gives one new business a Best-Practice Consultancy free every month. Click to see if you are eligible.
2. Go Freelance Guide does what it says on the tin and is available from Freelance Advisor, the site for all things freelance.
3. Thousands of people looking for a more fulfilling way of working have been helped by bestselling author Nick Williams’ ecourse Discover the Work You Were Born to Do
Enjoy your freebie, and maybe consider showing your support by following them on Twitter etc. Oh, and don’t forget to tell me if you’ve found other samples worth recommending.
PS I’ve now added some more great free resources for home workers.
Keeping down the cost of working away from home
7
Although we may spend most of our time working at home, many of us also have to travel occasionally for meetings, conferences and other work-related reasons.
You get the best prices on train tickets if you can book a couple of weeks in advance and I use thetrainline.com, where I can get return tickets to London, my usual destination, from £20 to £30 depending on time of travel.
Accommodation can be expensive, especially in London, which is why I tried out crashpadder.com earlier this year, with excellent results. I’ve also come across this Tune hotel in Elephant & Castle that has rooms for £35 a night! Do let me know if you try it out.
Finding a place to work in a strange town can be a nightmare of struggling through crowds to a chain coffee shop where you wait in a queue, juggle your order to a table covered with the last occupant’s rubbish, try not to have your drink jostled into your laptop and wait for wifi connection that may or may not materialise. And if it doesn’t you start all over again, buying more expensive snacks in an attempt to check your emails.
In London my oasis is Central just off Tottenham Court Road, where you will be greeted, served by friendly staff in a pleasant environment and enjoy immediate, fast wifi. All for the same price as a chain – no competition.
WorkSnug is a free mobile app that helps you find the nearest place – coworking space, coffee shop, pub – to work when you’re on the move anywhere in the world. You can read the reviews other mobile workers have written and add your own opinion.
Jelly organisers Hazel McLellan and Lyn French have a free wifi locator for the UK on their Find Good Customer Service website. Fellow Jelly organiser Rickie Josen has been impressed with the wifi in McDonalds at train stations.
If it’s a desk you’re after try Loosecubes and Deskwanted for workspace worldwide.
We’ve already had a couple of productive discussions about the ideal bag to carry round all your work stuff. What are your top tips for working away from home without busting the budget?
A good home working day – i Done This!
7
Despite being naturally untechie and a rather reluctant adopter, unlike San Sharma, occasionally I do stumble upon IT tools I like. I’ve already mentioned Pinterest, which is proving a colourful and popular way of posting content about home offices that doesn’t fit well elsewhere on the site.
Another little discovery I made all on my own is iDoneThis.com. So beautifully simple that even I could manage to sign up and get going without any help, it sends you an email at your chosen time each evening asking what you’ve done today. You reply listing the things you’ve ticked off and it builds up a satisfying calendar of achievement.
I find it motivating and a neat way of avoiding procrastination as I want to give a good account of myself every day, even if I’m the only one who’s checking! It’s also a good way of keeping track of progress, especially at those times when it feels like one step forward and two back. I’m sure I’m not the only home worker who feels like things never happen quickly enough. It’s good to remind myself that progress comes from doing the small things day after day, not just the big, flashy achievements, not matter how seductive they are.
And you can use it for other things like keeping track of an exercise programme, what you eat, or as a diary to record memories, dreams, anything you want to keep in chronological order.
Top 13 tech tools for home workers, part 3
143 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.
