Station Master's Journal

The large number of small businesses in Victoria that are operated from a home office always surprises me. Hopefully this entry will help those of you who are working from home. Recently A List Apart had a great article on working from home. They asked their readers to write in the best tips and tricks for working in a home office environment and they responded with some excellent tips.

Here are your secrets—how to balance work and family, maintain energy and focus, get things done, and above all, how to remember the love.

There's a solid 20-30 tips in the article so be sure to give it a good read if it apply's to you. While I can't say I'm a huge fan of the printable CEO series (I find it too much paperwork for my liking) I do find their tip on using GrandCentral catching my eye as I've been thinking for a while that it would be nice just to be able to give out one number to clients instead of both office and cell numbers.

A List Apart has also ran a similar article on the home work environment theme titled “Walking the line when you work from home” which is also a good read.

Enjoy!

In a study last year, Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England, found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email (bit.ly/email2). So people who check their email every five minutes waste 81/2hours a week figuring out what they were doing moments before.

Source: smh.com.au/nwes/biztech

This is a stunning statistic and I can definitely see the effect that rampant email checking can have in the workplace. In our dynamic office environment I've been trying to keep to checking email to 3-4 times per day. I find that once in the morning, once after lunch, and once closer to the end of the day really helps keep my focus task oriented. Apparently it also saves me 8.5 hours a week just in refocusing time according to this. One of the biggest reasons I've ran with this approach to checking email is that it also allows me to get through email in a very rapid way by batching writing emails together at one time. Just a few bits of food for thought.

If you are a big Mozilla Firefox fan (like we are) then you might be interested in this short list (heh) of 85 Firefox shortcuts for the PC and for the Mac.