Many people who work at home don’t really have a good space for it. Not all homes have enough room for a separate home office, but having a dedicated work space makes a big difference.

If your business is primarily or entirely online, the main thing you need is your computer and desk. If this can be separate from what the rest of the family uses, that’s a big step. There are few things more frustrating than having to sort out conflicting priorities that keep you entirely from working. But the kids need the computer for their homework and what do you do but give it up?

That’s why you need your own if at all possible.

A space to work on your business also makes it easier for you to set rules about when you are working. Even if you aren’t in a separate room you can set rules about what the kids can and cannot bother you with while you work.

The biggest challenge comes in when you can’t claim a separate space directly and you have to set up your home office in a shared area, maybe even a shared computer. You have to be able to do something.

My own office is somewhat shared. My own computer, desk shared (big desk). Much of my work time is with either one of the kids or my husband on the other computer. It makes for a bit more a challenge when working.

With this little space I keep a part of the desk and a file cabinet to my work. As I do work entirely online, my needs in terms of space are relatively few. Read the rest of this entry »

The trouble with home offices is that they are often a mess. In my experience it is easy to feel like it is more important to work than to straighten up my office. There are just so many more things I could be doing and they seem more profitable than handling the inevitable clutter.

But the time always comes when the job must be done. I have to clean my home office. And so I will share my tips for it with you.

Papers are one of the worst items for cluttering an office. It doesn’t matter if you do your business 100% online, somehow paper appears anyhow. Check stubs, random stuff you’ve printed, mail someone else dropped in your office for some unknown reason. And it just tends to sit, unfiled or not in the trash can.

As you can guess, the first step is to sort through all those papers sitting on your desk or elsewhere in your office. If you don’t have a good filing system set up, make one! There will come a time when you will need one or another piece of paperwork, and if it is filed you will have a much easier time finding it. Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping your home life and your professional life separate when you work at home can be a real challenge. If you fail to set enough boundaries, your work life can run right over your home life, leaving you feeling pressured to keep working and unable to enjoy the time with your family you would like to have.

Depending on the age of your children, there are many things you can do to make working at home a little easier to keep apart from the rest of your life. If you can spare the space and equipment to set things up separately you can make things much easier to keep apart.

A dedicated work space is perhaps the most important item. You need somewhere that you can get work done with minimal interference. Ideally, this means a room you can close off to use as your home office, but not everyone has a room available for a home office.

You’ll need rules about your office. Can the kids interrupt you freely? Can you have younger ones bring in toys to play quietly so you can work while still supervising them?

A separate work computer once again is ideal but not achievable for everyone. A work computer allows you to have a machine that you don’t have to compete with anyone else to use. If you need to keep files confidential it is much easier to do so on a private machine than one shared with your family. Read the rest of this entry »

A home office of one sort or another is a vital part of working at home. Some people manage to have an entirely separate room for their home office. Mine is a more or less dedicated room… unless you count all the kids’ toys right behind my chair, on my desk, under my feet…

It’s hard to keep kids out of the home office, especially when it doesn’t have a door. I’m not really sure what to call the room my office is in. It’s just off the dining area, but there’s no doorway as such; the spaces are open to each other aside from a wall less than two feet long.

Life has definitely become easier in many ways since we got a second computer. My son is too young to understand computers, but he sure likes to scroll around Google Earth. My daughter loves to play games on Noggin and similar sites. Letting the kids use the other computer gives me more time to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Clutter happens. For most people it’s a constant battle to keep their lives from getting too cluttered, and when you work at home you have all too much time to create clutter and what seems like too little time to take care of it.

Planning ahead can be a big help. If you have a place for everything that belongs in your home office, it is only a matter of building good habits to decrease your clutter. Putting things where they belong immediately is a good first step.

But first you have to break free of clutter. This means setting aside the time to take care of it. Don’t do a halfway job - you’ll just have to repeat it later. Take the time to plan things out first. Figure out where your problem areas are and how you can solve the problems.

Try organizing things by the task they belong to. If everything for a particular task is in one place, you’ll have a much easier time taking care of things. You want everything to be easy to get at later, not just easy to put away.

Be logical when you’re filing your papers. Certainly you can go the old route of filing things alphabetically, but might it be easier to file by category? Financial, family, insurance, taxes and so forth?

You don’t have to finish organizing your home office in a single day. You should, however, try to do it fairly quickly so that you don’t get frustrated and quit using the system you’ve already developed.

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