Just read a good article here about avoiding falling into a freelancer stereotype of getting up at noon and only working when a deadline looms. I’m pretty sure that most freelancers probably work harder for themselves than they would if being paid by “the man”.

Just read a nice article about structuring your hours when working at home. Everyone’s situation is a little different, so chances are that standard 9-5 hours are rarely going to apply to you when working from home. The article is giving good advice when it tells you to plan your work week then estimate the hours needed to fit everything in. The process of structuring your work like this usually leads to better efficiency when you do work because you know exactly what you’re doing from the moment you switch to work-mode.

An article on Personnel Today cites a report recently released suggesting 22% of employees would be willing to take a pay-cut in order to work from home. I can understand that - the costs of running an extra car for commuting and parking costs make a significant dent in a lot of employees incomes. Even with a slight pay-cut a lot of people would probably be better off working from home.

Read an interesting article today about the downsides to working at home - tenseness with your partner, isolation, not knowing when to take a break?!? etc. Worth a look

In the run-up to Christmas I was amazed at the number of people in the post-office sending off dozens of parcels with decidedly ebay-like address labels. I live in a small town and it must be empowering for people to make a bit of extra money by selling through the giant auction-monger. I also heard a lot of people in the post office queue’s tutting that people with lots of parcels were actually using the post office. The thing is, it’s these very people spending a few grand a year at the post office and causing queues that will help keep your local post offfice open. It’s clear that post offices might be losing out to courier services and other mail services, but the ebay phenomenon is keeping them busy. Long may it continue.

Here’s one great advantage to working at home. Powernaps.

Unless you’ve got  a private office at work and someone to guard the door, you’re never going to be able to kip through the day. If you’re working at home though, powernaps are not just an advantage, but they can help improve your efficiency.

The key to increasing your work efficiency with a powernap is to sleep for only 15 or 20 minutes. Longer can actually make you worse, but keep the nap short and you’ll arise fresh and sharp and get through more work than if you’d just had a coffee instead.

If you just can’t bring yourself to nap during the day, other good ways of increasing your work at home efficiency and waking up are to drink lots of water or go for a mile or two walk.

Nice interview on about.com about working at home with a disability. The interviewee is Jenni Prokopy who writes a site called chronicbabe.com and talks about how working at home as a disabled writer can help you succeed in a big way.

People doing it know all about it, but now the Guardian has an article on how homeworkers are often more productive than their office counterparts. Keen not to be seen as skivers or layabouts, homeworkers regularly and consistently get through more work at home than in the office.
So if you’re thinking about taking the plunge to have an easy life, forget it. You’ll be compared against everyone else working from home and may end up having to work harder to keep up.

There is a plan afoot in Whitchurch, Hampshire to enable residents to work from home more.

One of the things that many people find troublesome about working from home is finding the right place to work from where they wont be disturbed by the kids during phoen calls, or just a place you can concentrate for a few hours.

The plan for Whitchurch is to create a central homeworkers resource in order to keep more of the residents in the town and help them avoid having to commute to a workplace. What it sounds like is a kind of friendly local business centre with hot-desking and  related office services available.

I think this is a great idea and it would be good to see these places springing up all over the country.

The Guardian is reporting that drivers are being told to sort out the problem of rush hour congestion by working from home more or the government will charge them for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam. Not exactly applicable to everyone on the roads though, though no doubt many kids would like it if their teachers worked from home. The sentiment is good though it’s just the method that’s flawed. Rather than say “Work from home or we’ll charge you” they should be offering incentives to work from home, such as tax breaks or similar.