successful home working
Working from home tips
Snippets to help you to work from home success
Staying warm in the winter home office
91 month ago
Much to my joy, the winter so far here in the SW of England has been wonderfully mild, and today is so warm, windy and dry I’ve just put some washing out. I’ve worked in a number of home offices over the years and picked up some tricks for staying warm while working from home:
Draughtproofing – last year we were living in a house with Victorian single-glazed windows and it was freezing. I kept some curtains closed all day, but this is too depressing for a room you spend a lot of time in. The house we’re in now has secondary glazing and it makes a noticeable difference.
If you can’t install secondary or double glazing, fill gaps between sashes and cracks in woodwork with draughtproofing foam. A home working friend tells me that the temporary secondary glazing kits you install yourself using tape and plastic film smoothed out with a hairdryer are also very effective.
Fill gaps around doors (not forgetting keyholes!), pipework and electrical fittings. Block up gaps in floorboards where cold air will come whistling through.
Follow the sun – copy the cat, the ultimate comfort-loving animal, and make sure you’re always working in a patch of sunlight. In our current house, my home office faces north and gets no sun at all, whereas A’s is on the opposite side of the house and on clear days is bathed in sun all morning. I sometimes take my laptop in there when he’s out. Not only is it warmer but working in sunshine provides such a psychological lift.
Thanks to wifi I’ve also been working in the sitting room window to take advantage, not only of the sun, but also the woodburner, which we both love. I find that working away from my usual spot also helps productivity, which gives me a warm internal glow!
Localised heating – home workers are often reluctant to keep the heating on all day when the rest of the family is out, and these days the cost is often prohibitive anyway. Once your home office is draught-free, bring in a space heater to keep you warm all day without busting the budget. Oil-filled radiators are highly recommended by a home working friend and apparently cost only pennies a day to run.
I’m hoping this winter will stay mild, but many home workers are guaranteed months of snow and ice – how do you heat your home office as economically and greenly as possible to stay warm over the winter?
Home business & dealing with the Christmas slowdown
181 month ago
It can seem to the home business owner that the corporate world starts to slow down for Christmas from the beginning of December, when you first get replies like ‘We can’t make a decision on that until the New Year’. It can be a difficult month to get payment as accounts departments may be short-staffed. Getting over the seasonal hump requires a little planning, so here are a few hints on how to manage this time of year most effectively:
Take yourself off on an extended holiday
One of the chief gripes of those working for themselves is that there’s never enough time for a decent holiday. Take a look at previous years’ figures to find out how big your seasonal dip actually is. If many of the people you deal with are unavailable, it could be a the ideal opportunity to take a break with minimum disruption to your cash flow. An escape to a warmer climate could give you a much-needed boost of sunshine to get the New Year off to a good start.
Work on your business, instead of in it
Another frequent complaint is of never having the time to step back, get things into perspective and plan future development. Use the slowdown to draw breath, look at what you’ve accomplished and where you want to go next. Even better to get some fellow freelancers round for seasonal refreshments while you all give feedback to each other and share ideas.
Clear the decks
Fewer phone calls and a slower work flow give you the chance to clear paperwork, do computer housekeeping and generally weed out stuff you no longer need that’s getting in the way of finding the stuff you do. It’s also a great way to prepare mentally for the year ahead with an office detox
Chase payment
Find out from clients exactly what their arrangements for payment will be over the holiday period, so you can allow for it when invoicing. Get your invoices in promptly and then chase payment – politely, of course! – as soon as it’s due. The New Year can be a tricky time for cash flow so you’ll feel the benefits for a while to come.
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.
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.
Top 10 Tech Tools for home workers
104 months ago
My guest at How to Work from Home – The Inside Guide last Thurday evening was San Sharma, Community Manager of small business support company Enterprise Nation and WorkSnug, the workspace app. San is a self-confessed nerd and an astonishingly early adopter, but unusually for a nerd, he also has a lively sense of humour and a lightness of touch when talking about IT. So he was the perfect person to introduce some top tech tools to a home working audience, many of whom would probably describe themselves as technology sceptics – technology enables us to work the way we do, but we’re not very interested in it for its own sake and certainly don’t seek out new ways of doing things.
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!
