This friday, employers are being urged to allow their employees to work from home. Yippee!

Hang on, I do it already. Oh well.

CNN have an article about work at home scams. People who use the internet a lot may well be familiar with most of these common scams, but if you are approaching starting a home business without much experience of the scams that are going on on the internet then do have a look and beware you don’t fall prey to any of these scams.

I know I keep linking to these, but I guess whenever I find a good work at home website I want to share it. This one has been around for ages - I remember looking at it a few years ago. Busy forums and a really nice feel to the site make it a pleasant place to spent time researching work at home business and opportunities.
The site is http://www.wahm.com and is primarily aimed at work at home mums, but I think work at home dad’s are made just as welcome.

The Yellow Pages in the UK has a survey out reporting a boom in work at home mothers over the last six years. The story is in the BBC news website. They cite one example of a woman with a nursing agency in Glasgow that she runs from home and it has been turning over £11 million a year for the last 3 years. Not too shabby. I wonder if they’ve got any info on the numbers of Dad’s working from home?

It only happens occassionaly, but when the little one brings home a cold from nursery I am bound to catch it. And being a typical bloke, I don’t suffer illness well. I get grumpy.

However when you work from home you are way less likely to chuck a sicky, so in my case I go down to my computer and get digitally grumpy. It doesn’t help. The cold is still there and the amount of work I’ve got through is close to none. All I’ve done is go and be grumpy on some forums and generally feel sorry for myself.

Hope it goes away soon (both the cold and the grump).

There’s a nice article here about basic time management to ensure you get maximum efficiency when working at home and the kids are back at school. OK, it’s aimed at work at home mums but really applies to everyone.

I think that effective time management is the biggest obstacle most people face when they start working from home. Even when you’ve been doing it for a few years, it pays to revisit your plan for time management. If you can shave an hour or two off the time spent “working” each day and still get the same amount of work done, then that’s another hour or two you have to spend with your kids.

The BBC reports that fathers in the UK are unwilling to break with tradition and don’t tend to change their working habits to cope with the responsibilities of being a new parent. It’s a sad thing. Dad’s working at home is the new revolution. If more of us would embrace it there would be communities of work at home dad’s springing up all over the place. Just imagine, doing some work first thing then going down the park with your child and meeting up with your mates and their kids for a kick about. Is it such a bad thing?

I know I’m not alone in this venture of being a work at home dad. Here’s a few other sites I’ve come across:

• Work at Home Dad
• Rebel Dad
• DadStaysHome.com
• EntrepreneurDad.com
• DaddyPlace.com
• Work at Home Humour

I know there are loads more of you out there, drop me a line at bigcrags aT gmail dOt com and let me know about your site.

Came across an article today listing 10 tips that Patty Harder would give to anyonestarting a new freelance writing career. While they are aimed at writers, these tips are applicable accross the board - web developers, graphic designers, artists and illustrators could all take something from this.

The tip I took from it is:

9. Put Paying Tasks at the Top of Your Daily To-Do List

At the top of my daily to-list are projects that are almost complete. (A finished project means that I can invoice for that work.) Next, are the longer jobs that I need to move forward. Non-paying work tasks are next, such as balancing my checkbook. Finally, I add personal time and household chores.

This is something I’m guilty of. I tend to do things like write a couple of blog articles and browse through my news aggregator before I start on my paying work. It really should be the other way around. Read the entire article here: 10 Tips I Wish Someone Had Given Me Before I Launched My Freelance Writing Career By Patty Harder

You remember what it was like in a regular job. Sun was out, you still had to work. Friends were going on a trip, you had to work. Could use a day to sort out the car but you had to work.

The good news is that working at home gives you the power to change all that. If your mates are organising a day away, you just sort your work around it and get away with them. If your head is feeling fried sitting in front of the computer, you have the power to switch off and get out in the sun for a while.

This doesn’t mean that working at home is a recipe for slacking off. More than ever you need to get through the work that’s on your plate or you wont get paid, or your business wont grow. I personally find that my line of work excites me enough that if I take an afternoon off to go for a walk, that evening I’ll be right back at the screen checking if I missed anything and trying to catch up on the few hours I’ve missed.

On the flip side, you have to remember to have a home life too. Not every hour you spend at home has to be working. Set a day or two days at the weekend where you simply don’t allow yourself to work and you really will feel like you’ve had a break and might not need to slack off during the week. Maybe if you play catch-up in the evenings you should set a late limit e.g. never work past 10pm.
If you set yourself a target of working x amount of hours per week then you’ll find that you usually manage to do it, even if you take breaks during what would normally be your main working hours if you were still in a non-work at home job. Don’t feel guilty about taking breaks, but don’t abuse them either.