Web Worker Daily

I’m one of those fanatics who goes out before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving, to wait in line for the doors of my favorite stores to open so I can snap up the best deals before they are gone. It sounds really crazy, until you see my receipts and calculate how much money I’m saving for my effort. Read the rest of this entry »

The successive typhoons that recently came over the Philippines gave my roof and ceiling a complete beating. I thought I could ignore the rainwater dripping into every room in the house but, when I woke up one morning and found my head completely wet thanks to a new hole, I knew I couldn’t postpone the repairs any longer.

But working from home and having your home repaired can be a chaotic mix. It tends to destroy your routine, concentration and even the quality of your work. So what can we home office workers do to prevent that from happening? Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I changed my home office setup, and found myself with pretty severe neck pain as a result. I switched to a chair that provided better back support and raised my laptop, adding an external mouse and keyboard to try to alleviate the problem. It did, but not as much as I’d have liked. Now I’m trying regular breaks and exercises to see if that makes a difference.

Interestingly, I never had these problems when I worked in an onsite office: I always managed to adjust my chair to suit my needs, and have my monitor at the right level. Since I spend a lot of time out of my home office anyway, my office setup only has an impact on the sedentary part of my work week; the rest is, as they say, in the lap of the gods. Read the rest of this entry »

I confess: I’m a terrible scatterbrain. It takes a lot for me to force my thoughts into a nice, orderly line and to keep them there — particularly in those busy times when I have a lot of competing priorities. In those times, I’ll often find myself working on one project while ideas for other tasks pop into my head at random.

Those thoughts can be as simple as “don’t forget to email Pete about that invoice” or as intricate as a new angle on an idea I’d been working on before. They’re basically the random things my brain spews out while I’m trying to focus on something else. I know I’m not alone — a lot of people experience the same thing.

Through a long process of trial and error, I’ve found that the best way to deal with these random thoughts — thoughts that are important and valuable, but unrelated to the task I’m working on — is to note them down. This way, I can be sure I won’t forget them, but I also reduce their interruption into my focus on other tasks. Read the rest of this entry »

During the past month, I’ve been busy redecorating and rearranging my home office. I spend most of my time there after all, so it needs to be conducive to productivity. For all my planning, there seems to be an aspect of my home office that I’ve largely ignored — the lighting. Read the rest of this entry »

In my school district, kids get out of school as early as 2:45 pm and as late as 4:15 pm. If you start working after the kids leave for school, you can usually get around six or seven hours of work done. Most people tend to work at least eight hours per day — so how do you deal with the after-school time, when work still needs to be done?

You may need to help the younger ones with homework or teach them study skills. You may need to switch into chauffeur mode to get the kids to sports, music lessons or club activities. Everyone has different needs and situations. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of suggestions of things that you can do to keep your kids happy and meet your deadlines: Read the rest of this entry »

My employer’s currently on a kick to reduce printing costs, so those in the office are being strenuously encouraged to reduce our print output, and when we do print, to print everything double-sided with black ink only, unless single-sided or colored printing is absolutely imperative.

Of course, technically, this rule doesn’t apply to those of us who can also work remotely — if we really want to, we can print everything in color and on heavy stock, single-sided in our home offices. But of course this low-print policy is also sensibly applied in my remote office as well as at company HQ.

The die-hard anti-corporate web worker may not want to hear this, but as it turns out, many corporate office policies may come in handy in your remote workplace. I can think of three very common policies that can also fit well into a remote work philosophy. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I woke up to find that my partner had rearranged my home office. She spent the better part of the morning turning it into our home office.

I shouldn’t have been surprised — I’d told her earlier in the week that we might become more productive if we work near each other. At that time it was merely a suggestion. I didn’t think that one day I would just wake up and find it a reality. Read the rest of this entry »