Got a remote gig that allows you to work from home but a home that isn’t exactly palatial? Design pros channel James Bond to offer clever solutions to keep your business and personal life from blurring, even if you’re living in tight quarters.
New scientific evidence is emerging about the benefits of telework, supporting workers’ desire to work out of the office. Stowe Boyd discusses the implications involved in the increasingly popular post-industrial adoption of telecommuting, and explains why coworking may be the missing link.
After experimenting with coworking for a short time, I wrote about how I had gone from skeptical about it to a convert. Since, though, then I’ve realized there’s something else that makes coworking even more appealing.
Here I go again, writing about organization. This time, though, it’s not because I’ve found a great new app to help me. That’s my inbox, aka my “to-be-dealt-with” pile. And there are two more like it. If only there were an app that could help me!
When you pitched your employer on the idea of telecommuting, you may have had ideas of working from local coffee shops, taking your laptop around to wonderful places, and generally working on the go. But the fact of the matter is that you’ll wind up working from home quite a bit. That means that having a comfortable work space in your home office is crucial — the couch or the dining room table won’t cut it if you’re working for hours on end. If you haven’t had a particularly good space in the past, that may mean investing in some office furniture. The price tag on a solid desk and a comfortable chair can be quite steep, though. Depending on your employer, there are ways to get a little help with that expense. Read More about Ask Your Employer for Help With Home Office Furniture Costs
A few of my local clients like to meet in person every so often. We usually go to a local coffee house — we’re able to take laptops along, if we need to double check something online and we can get coffee while we talk. But sometimes a coffee shop isn’t convenient or a client wants to meet for longer than is really fair to sit in a coffee shop. I’m in exactly that situation: I’ve got a client who I need to work with in person for a couple of hours. She doesn’t have an office outside of her home and neither do I. We’re going to meet at my house. Read More about Should You Let Clients and Co-Workers See Your Home?
Our working environments are an area of great interest here at WebWorkerDaily, with some great advice from our writers on equipping and styling a home office for pleasure and productivity. So I was interested to see this interesting tongue-in-cheek talk from Sam Martin on “manspaces” at last summer’s TED Global 2009 conference.
Read More about The Quirky World of “Manspaces” and Bachelor Pads
I’m one of those fanatics who goes out before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving, to wait in line for the doors of my favorite stores to open so I can snap up the best deals before they are gone. It sounds really crazy, until you see my receipts and calculate how much money I’m saving for my effort. Read More about Finding Web Worker Gear Deals on Black Friday
The successive typhoons that recently came over the Philippines gave my roof and ceiling a complete beating. I thought I could ignore the rainwater dripping into every room in the house but, when I woke up one morning and found my head completely wet thanks to a new hole, I knew I couldn’t postpone the repairs any longer.
But working from home and having your home repaired can be a chaotic mix. It tends to destroy your routine, concentration and even the quality of your work. So what can we home office workers do to prevent that from happening? Read More about How to Work From Home During Chaotic Repairs
Recently, I changed my home office setup, and found myself with pretty severe neck pain as a result. I switched to a chair that provided better back support and raised my laptop, adding an external mouse and keyboard to try to alleviate the problem. It did, but not as much as I’d have liked. Now I’m trying regular breaks and exercises to see if that makes a difference.
Interestingly, I never had these problems when I worked in an onsite office: I always managed to adjust my chair to suit my needs, and have my monitor at the right level. Since I spend a lot of time out of my home office anyway, my office setup only has an impact on the sedentary part of my work week; the rest is, as they say, in the lap of the gods. Read More about DIY Home and Mobile Office Ergonomics
