Making Your Home Work for Your Business

If you’re one of the many thousands of people who are relocating their working life back into their home life you’re going to have to find a way to make them both coexist. What was once your haven from work has now become intermingled with it, so what can you do to keep both lives separate while having them in the same place?

Shutting out your home life: You’ll want to make sure that your normal home life doesn’t interfere with you work life, and to do that you need to separate your work environment from your home environment by having a room in the house that’s solely dedicated to your work.

If you’re able to just shut yourself off from everything else it will make concentrating on the work you have to do so much easier. It also means that when you’ve finished for the day you can shut your work off from your normal life. Not everyone has a spare room in their house that they can use for this purpose, but you’ll need somewhere that you can shut yourself off from the rest of the world, even if it’s just a corner of your bedroom.

Make the most of what you already have: Some people feel the need to go out and buy special furniture that they can use in their home office, but that often turns out to be an expense they didn’t need to have.

In most cases you won’t be bring clients back to your home office, so you have nobody that you need to impress with the latest state of the art furniture, you’re just adding to your start up costs. If you have a laptop and broadband wireless connection you can work on virtually any old piece of furniture you have lying around – save the expensive stuff for when the business expands and you need to fill your boardroom.

Right at your finger tips: How organized a person are you when you’re at home? Now, if you imagine how bad that might be, try scattering your work items around the house too – doesn’t look good does it? There are something’s that can be forgiven if they go missing in the household for a few hours, but if they’re things that you need so as to do your work it can ruin your whole day.

If you have a specific room for your work then that’s great, you’ve narrowed down where they might be. The best thing to do, however, is to group things together and make sure you put them back there when you’ve finished with them. It may sound like the sort of thing you’d tell your children to do, but, it will save you a lot of time. Also, try keeping things that you’d use in tandem with each other close together i.e. printer paper and toner cartridges close to the printer, CD’s or DVD’s close to the computer etc.

Get an additional phone line: There are so many people who work from home who try to economize by just using their home phone to run their business from, and it often turns out to be a false economy.

Have you ever tried to fight your teenager off so you could get to the phone to make a normal call? Just how professional would your business appear if the person on your end of the line picked up the phone and said “yeah, who is it?” not quite the impression you’ll be hoping to set is it?

If you have a separate line and phone you’ll be able to answer it in a professional manner using the name of your company, which gives a far more sophisticated feel to your operation.

Also, if you do have a dedicated line you will get bills that relate to that phone only, which will make life far easier when it comes to paying the bills and keeping track of it in the company’s books.

There aren’t too many things you need to do in order to keep your home and work life separate, and it needed cost you a lot to do if you have a room that you can use solely as your office. It just takes a few small changes and you can soon have your work and home life coexisting in perfect harmony – or pretty close anyway.

If you're still looking for that perfect opportunity, then check out these home working jobs and get yourself making money with a job that suits you.