Working From Home
While working from home has many benefits, it can also mean that the line between home and work becomes blurred, in which case, it requires discipline to make home-working successful. Here are some tips to help you get the best out of your home-working routine.
- Choose Hours that suit you: This may sound obvious, but if you worked in an office prior to working from home, you may still have a ‘9 to 5’ mindset. For those of us with children at school, the best hours may be 10am to 2pm. Depending on your line of work, making just slight adjustments to your schedule will still allow you to complete your work and achieve a healthy balance in your personal life.
- Be Realistic: If you have toddlers at home with you during the day, be realistic as to how much you can achieve with constant interruptions. Plan ahead and create/buy age-appropriate activity kits, such as play dough, drawing kits, dressing up clothes, or educational DVDs to keep them occupied for bouts during the day. However, you will be far more productive if you can concentrate on your work uninterrupted. Find a registered childminder, babysitter, or nanny at www.childcare.co.uk. Alternatively, try swapping child-minding days with a friend and delegate a couple of days when you can both benefit from some child-free time.
- Pace yourself: When you do have uninterrupted time to yourself, don’t be tempted to sit at your desk all day to slog through that ‘To Do’ list. After a few hours’ work, treat yourself to a brisk walk around the block. The short break away from the computer screen will help to clear your head, not to mention a great way to stretch those muscles.
- Be Firm: Are you trying to work from home, while at the same time acting as a full-time mum available to all? Make it clear to friends and family that certain days or times are for work. The less ambiguity there is with your work routine, the easier it will be for people to work around you. Being firm also means being prepared to say ‘no’. You can’t put in a day’s work and be expected to run personal errands throughout the day.
- Be Adaptable: There will be times when you will not be as productive as you would like. If Johnny falls ill and needs to be collected early from school, do you have a back-up plan for ‘That Urgent Project’? Having a handy-helper to call upon could mean the difference between harmony and complete chaos.
- Be Professional: Run your home office like the ‘real’ office – so no working in your pajamas! Set boundaries by closing your office door. Even if your office is just a section of your living room, set boundaries by creating an ‘office’ desk where you keep your work. Don’t allow your children to answer your business telephone. It portrays the wrong image to clients.
- Take your work on the road: On a glorious sunny day, why not work for an hour or two in the park. Or on occasion, why not work in a local Work Hub. Work Hubs were designed with the modern mobile worker in mind, and offer flexible workspaces with bookable ‘hot’ desks, high speed broadband facilities and meeting spaces. You can work in a relaxed environment which encourages collaboration with other workers, but without the ‘hard sell’ that can come with networking. Many Work Hubs also offer small business advice, so they are perfect for start-ups. Do take time off once in a while to network. The process of meeting new business associates, as well as acquiring and sounding out ideas will keep you feeling mentally invigorated.
Above all else, don’t be a slave to your work routine. Your work/life balance doesn’t suddenly become perfect once you work from home, but you can embrace it as a wonderful opportunity to have a more flexible work life balance.
Have any tips of your own? Care to share?
Mary
Home-working has many benefits, but it can also mean that the line between home and work becomes blurred. This is especially true during half-term. While most of us will have become self-employed in order to have half-terms and summer holidays off (no more begging the boss!) realistically, there will be times when you still need to catch up.
So here are a few tips to stop you from tearing your hair out, if THAT URGENT project needs to be completed during the school holidays.
1. Plan to work for time slots during the day: Please school holidays with the family, and agree days that you will have undivided play time with the kids. Plan work days, or more realistically, time slots when you must have uninterrupted work time. You can be surprisingly focused when you know you have 2 or 3 hours to work.
2. Round up support: Plan ahead and swap child-minding days with a friend. Delegate a couple of days when you can both benefit from some child-free time. Once again, you can be far more productive (and guilt-free).
3. Pace yourself: When you do have uninterrupted time to yourself, don’t be tempted to sit at your desk all day to slog through that ‘To Do’ list. After a few hours’ work, treat yourself to a brisk walk around the block. The short break away from the computer screen will help to clear your head, not to mention a great way to stretch those muscles.
4. Be Professional: Continue to run your home office like the ‘real’ office. Speaking from personal experience, this is considerably harder during the school holidays. Even if your office is just a section of your living room, don’t allow the kids to answer the telephone – it portrays the wrong image to clients. Divert calls to your mobile, or treat yourself to a Virtual Receptionist. Costs are often as reasonable as £20/£30 per month – although some offer a very handy trial period.
5. Take your work on the road: There’s no harm in taking your MAC/laptop to your local Gambados, Eddie Katz, or whatoever your local indoor play area is. Most have WiFi areas and even free internet access. My kids love our local and completely forget I’m there – until they’re hungry in which case, as it has a lovely restaurant, I simply refuel them and let them run riot again.
6. Relax, have fun: Don’t be a slave to your work routine. Remember why you chose to be come self-employed in the first place. It’s half-term – go have fun with the kids!
Mary
Your website is your showcase to the world. You are proud of it and have invested time and resources into making it useful and relevant. You want everybody to visit it. But did you know that you might be restricting an entire group of users – and potential customers – from doing so?
These are people with disabilities, people for whom activities that many of us take for granted can present some challenges. Nevertheless, these same people are doing exactly what the rest of us are doing – working, enjoying food, leisure and sport. They have spiritual, scientific, political and environmental awareness, and social and economic mobility. So why should they, just by being differently-abled, be prevented from utilising something as commonplace as a website?
What is accessibility?
Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, service or environment is available to people. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published Web accessibility guidelines, focused on people with special needs and their right of access to online content. Accessible websites empower everyone to have equal opportunity to obtain information and services.
Examples of Accessibility
- Textual equivalents of images. Blind users who use ‘text-to-speech’ software can ‘read’ the content.
- Enlargeable text, images and highlighted hyperlinks: Allows the poor sighted and the colour blind to see content clearly.
- Large hyperlinks, buttons and keyboard shortcuts: Allows users who have problems with keeping their hands steady to click on them easily……
this is an edited version of the full article, featured in Work Your Way Magazine Issue 3. To order a single copy or to ensure you never miss a copy by subscribing, please click on the subscribe link in the sidebar.
SME Business Mums say it will be business as usual this Christmas, and give their top tips for surviving the festive season and fitting in work around the family’s social calendar
The festive holidays are upon us and while office workers are able to get time off over the holidays for many self-employed and small business owners, it will be business as usual.
SMEs obviously need to plan ahead so as not to lose money over the holidays. Whether or not you actually celebrate Christmas, it’s still the time of year when everyone has more time off than usual. It can be tricky when friends and relatives want to visit and you have a business to run.
Business owners, particularly mums, have a tendency to try and be superwoman. This can lead to added stress and ultimate burnout.
So how can you survive the holiday season as a business owner mum?
Here are our top tips:
“Approach all the things on your to-do list with an armful of creativity and flexibility, don’t set yourself an impossible list of things to do and end up stressing out yourself and your family. Be very clear about what’s important to you this time of year – you don’t have to say yes to every festive networking event, and the world won’t end if you have to buy mince pies instead of making them.
Don’t forget to ask for help -self-employed women have a tendency towards “superwoman” activity. There’s no shame in asking for an extra pair of hands to childmind, clean, post letters or whatever else needs doing. And finally, never lose sight of why you work for yourself in the first place – you chose self-employment for a very good reason.”
Justine Swainson, Director of Turningpoint Coaching and Training www.turningpointcoachingandtraining.co.uk
“Plan ahead and arrange the necessary childcare in advance so that you and your children know when you are working and when you are on mummy duty. It saves a lot of stress.”
Alexander Atkins, founder of The Ultimate Baby Shower www.theultimatebabyshower.co.uk
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One of the greatest challenges faced by parents who run a business from home is achieving a balance between work and parenting. We want the best for our children, of course, but any job or business requires dedication too. The thought of doing it all can make our heads spin, but fear not! Working from home can be bliss, if you follow a few rules.
Banish Guilt. When mother is happy, kids are happy. A contented and fulfilled mother, whether she is employed or not, tends to have healthier kids who cope well with stress and do better in academic tests. So, if you’re doing work that brings you happiness or makes you feel more financially secure, give yourself ten parenting points.
Eat Breakfast. Sit down with your family in the morning and eat. A healthy breakfast sets a good example to your children and gives you the get-up-and-go you need to get a morning’s work in. If you wait until later, you will either cut into your work time staring into the fridge or forget entirely until you’re passing out in the line at the bank. Plus, studies show that people who eat a healthy breakfast burn more calories during the day and are healthier and more fabulous!
Get Dressed. Slouching around in your jammies is bliss, but trust me. You’ll work more efficiently if you brush your teeth and put your grownup trousers on. If your work is messy, cover up. If safety wear is needed, do wear it.
Master The Telephone. If your children are very little, make sure you have a good answering machine, and let it pick up. Nothing makes you sound less professional than having to stop in mid sentence to yell “DO NOT put that in your brother’s nose YOUNG MAN!” With older kids, develop a ‘Work Call’ signal. For my boys, I explained that sometimes, a phone call would be important and they should be as quiet and good as mice, if I snapped my fingers. This, amazingly, worked! Thank your children profusely if they do respect your business phone time. And try to keep these calls short: it’s better to say “Sorry I can’t talk more right now, I will get back to you,” than have bored children deciding that enough is enough!
Limit Distractions. If you work on the computer, consider using a different browser or different user screen when you are working, one that doesn’t have your personal email or social sites logged in. It’s a good idea to have all of your work-related computer bookmarks and documents separate from personal and family ones. If you work at a craft, set aside a space (or a room, if you can) for work only. It is easy to spend hours procrastinating, and put off the job till the very last minute, if you’re not careful.
Stop. It’s tempting to spend your whole life working, creating, checking your email, thinking about your next meeting or idea and making phone calls, especially in the early months of building a business, but remember that your family needs your attention too. Plan on not thinking about work after a certain hour at night, and get enough sleep so that you can be organized and on the ball tomorrow. Switch off the computer, switch on the answer phone, put your messy-play clothes on. Take the family to the park, for some restoring exercise and oxygen to the brain! You may keep a notebook in your pocket to jot down ideas for tackling during your next work session (some of us can never completely switch off). When you do return to work, you will be refreshed and ready to tackle anything!
