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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the dot com boom of the oughties, and websites such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace, the number of people who decided to develop their own home business grew as distribution and payment methods became less convoluted. But as these endeavours grew from weekend hobbies into full-blown home businesses with a handful of employees, few will have looked into taking out professional liability insurance from a specialist such as Staveley Head.



For those that don’t know, professional liability insurance pays out against claims and damages made against your business, protecting your belongings in case you injure or damage people or property when on business related duty. If you could have done anything in your power to avoid any damage, chances are legal action may follow and this is where you’ll make a claim on your professional liability insurance.

As an example of the type of claims professional liability insurance protects against, the following outlines basic procedure and cover:


During a new employee’s first week, the individual hasn’t been brought up to scratch with proper health and safety protocol nor has the home workspace been kept as tidy as it should. While packing orders to post to customers, he slips on some loose box-wrap and injures his knee. It always serves businesses, no matter how big or small, to prepare for these kinds of eventualities through health and safety talks and/or forms that the employee fills out when they begin working for you. 


Either way, the employee might still decide to file a claim against you, so you will immediately want to ring your insurance company and report the event after dealing with any immediate medical emergencies. If the individual does decide to pursue legal recourse then normally your business will receive a notice of complaint and request for compensation, which you should immediately hand over to your insurance company.



There isn’t a precise way to determine when you are legally responsible for an injury with a slip, trip or fall case and in conjunction with correspondence to the insurer, independent legal advice should also be sought. Each case depends on whether you, as the business owner, were proactive enough that it wasn’t likely to happen and whether the employee was careless in not seeing or avoiding the item which caused the fall.

In most cases, the individual would have to prove that the cause of the accident presented an unreasonable risk and couldn’t have been anticipated under the circumstances. In order for him to establish this for his claim he would have to show that you had created the condition and that you knew about it and neglected to resolve it.

In this case, there must be a negligent party who caused the injury. As the employee was partially at fault for his own injury, he might still have grounds for a claim but his winnings would be significantly smaller than if it had solely been the home business owner’s fault. 



Professional liability insurance is relatively inexpensive compared to potential pay-outs resulting from any claims and there are plenty of policies to protect you and your home business out there. Don’t take the risk!

San was ably assisted by Francesca Geens of Digital Dragonfly, who describes her role as providing non-geeky IT help for one man businesses. We couldn’t have been in better hands! Francesca is kindly writing up the Top 10 Tech Tools for the unlucky home workers who couldn’t be with us at Central – I’ll add the link as soon as it’s available.

Once again the meet-up produced some immediate positive results for those who came, and we all left, not only with plenty of new tools to investigate, but more importantly with a curiosity to try them that we normally lack. Kerry Law has been transformed from IT Luddite to Hootsuite user, Richard of Desktag has been converted to Google Chrome and Evernote, and I now know how to use Instapaper to quickly save the links I find while surfing for later use on my Work from Home Wisdom Facebook page, Pinterest and Twitter.

The next meet-up of How to Work from Home – The Inside Guide is on Thursday 27 October at Central, WC1, and our guest will be Emma Jones of Enterprise Nation and StartUp Britain. Don’t miss it, it’s bound to be another corker!