Working from home is a rewarding experience in giving you the freedom to be comfortable in your own environment and avoid a stressful commute, as well as enabling you to pursue your own business dreams from the comfort of your own home. Where most start-up businesses may only need access to a laptop and internet connection, you may think that there are no changes which need to be made to your property in preparation of starting your work from home, but there are significant things you need to consider when performing your work from your personal property.
Here are important factors to consider when preparing your home for your work.
1. Consider Extra Storage Options
Depending on the area of your business, you may need extra storage for a variety of reasons, and on different scales. It may be as simple as needing filing storage, or it may be much more demanding such as needing a whole room to store your work. If you have outside space, it may be beneficial to consider outdoor storage options such as a shed, in order to ensure that your work items don’t obstruct the general running of your home and take up room initially reserved for home life. Otherwise, an unused spare room may be a good idea to store work items if there is nowhere else.
If your home-based business is too demanding in terms of the amount of storage space needed, you could also consider external storage options such as renting a storage container with an official provider.
2. Optimize Your Utilities
You’re going to be spending the majority of your time in your property when you switch to home-based working. Where utilities can be expensive even in a home which is only used as a personal property, they’re going to significantly increase when you’re spending your working hours at home, too. This doesn’t necessarily relate to work-based expenses, either: being at home means you’re going to be using more electricity for cooking your lunches, brewing up your coffee or tea on your break and using more power to light up your workspace. Not to mention the increased use of the bathroom facilities whilst spending all your day at home.
With that in mind, it’s important to arrange your utilities the best way you can. This means installing eco-friendly lightbulbs, for example, which could save you money on your bills, and you could consider positioning your workstation close to sources of natural light so as to save money on using artificial light.
Furthermore, when working from home, a problem arising such as an electrical fault or a blocked pipe is not only going to serve as a disruption to your personal life but your work schedule, too. When issues arise, it’s important to call on same-day services to have the problem fixed as soon as possible so that you can return to your work, such as Pascoe’s Plumbers.
3. Minimize Distractions
You should opt to work in a place which is far away from technology such as your TV and tech gadgets which could serve to distract you from your work. You may have no other choice than to work in your living room, but if you are doing so, ensure your television is turned off and other distractions are out of sight, in order to better focus on your work.
4. Choose a Designated Workspace
When working from home, it’s easy to let your work life slip too far into your personal life, so that soon you may not know where one ends and the other begins. Separating your work and personal life through the use of a chosen workstation means that you can differentiate between work and home. This could be in the form of a room used solely for your home office, which is off-limits during non-working hours and which you can close the door on when you aren’t working. Or else you could have a specific spot which you use for work, and ensure that it is completely cleared at the end of the working day and restored to a home-friendly condition.
5. Set Up a Business PO Box Address
Working from home and running a business from home means that the only physical address you have to put on record for correspondence is your home address. In most cases, to keep your home and business life private and not have to give out the private details of your home address during invoicing or letterheads, for example, it’s a good idea to open up a PO Box address to use this address on all business correspondence. Just because you work from home does not mean that you have to give out your home address to everybody you perform business with. A PO Box address can also look more official and professional rather than using a residential address.
6. Inform Friends and Loved Ones of What You Are Doing
Whether you live alone, with roommates or with a family, working from home is going to affect them, too. It’s important to encourage your family to respect your boundaries when working from home if they will be in the property at the same time: for example, your loved ones need to know that they cannot disturb your work simply because you are present at home.
Furthermore, it’s easy for certain friends and individuals to see working from home as an easy way to be available on a flexible basis. Creating a working routine and set hours for yourself means you can tell friends when you are available to socialize and be adamant with it; don’t allow your friends to change your working routine by expressing their wish to ‘quickly pop round’ or pressure you into changing your working hours.
When you are not physically attending a job, some people may view your presence at home as an invitation to your social availability, but it’s not the case.
