‘Office working has never suited me. The main reason for this is that I feel completely stifled by routine. One of the reasons I stopped working for someone else was that when I walked into the office, I knew what I would be doing that day … and I knew what I would be doing the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and could see my dreary working life mapped out, all the way to the horizon.

‘Working for myself, no two days are the same, and the day I am expecting when I wake up in the morning is not usually the day I’m reflecting back on that evening! I love how great opportunities constantly come up if you’re open to them, and if you’re not in the right mood for something on one particular day, no worries, you can adjust your day accordingly. And THAT is why I don’t have an office! I don’t have a separate space for a home office at home, and I will never rent any office space if I can avoid it.’

I love this firstly because it confirms my own belief that you don’t need a dedicated space for a home office, and it’s always nice to feel right, and secondly because it so neatly sums up the reasons so many of us choose this path and continue on it, even when it gets hard – very hard – and a job and salary seem such a tempting alternative.

Sheree asked me why I set up Work from Home Wisdom. The short answer is that I work for myself because working for someone else feels limiting and lacking in fulfilment. And I’m doing this work relating to home working because I previously ran a cleaning business that was financially very successful but mind-numbingly dull.

I knew that my next venture had to be something that drew much more on my experience and skills and allowed me to express myself more, and after a very long time this is what it turned out to be! I’m still working on how to make it as financially viable as the cleaning business, and I’ll be telling you more about my plans soon.

Why have you chosen to do what you do? Was it carefully planned or did you fall into it by accident?

Many people have committed to cutting their budget this year in order to pay off debt and to accumulate savings. One way to accomplish this goal is to save money on home insurance. Home businesses have similar goals and strive to reduce the cost of their public liability insurance. Although these two types of insurance products apply to different types of customers, saving money on these insurance policies follow the same basic strategy.

Home insurance provides coverage for fire, theft and damage due to various weather conditions. It also covers damages that result when an individual sustains an injury while on another’s premises. Similarly, public liability insurance provides coverage to home businesses if a client has an accident while visiting your home office for a meeting. It will also cover you for damage you cause while visiting a client’s premises.

One way to save money on home insurance or public liability insurance is for the individual or home business to assess the real amount of insurance needed. Many individuals pay for too much insurance that is drastically over the amount that they should realistically be paying for. On the other hand, if a serious injury occurs on an individual’s property or on the premises of a business, having adequate coverage can prevent an injured victim from seeking damages from the homeowner or business owner directly.

Another way to save money on property insurance or public liability insurance is to secure multiple insurance policies from the same insurance company. A homeowner can obtain automobile insurance in addition to her property insurance. A home business owner can obtain malpractice or health insurance in combination with public liability insurance. Most insurance companies offer a sizable discount for multiple policies.

One of the best ways to save money on any type of insurance is to use a price comparison site. These sites allow homeowners and home business owners to key in the amount of coverage that they need and results will populate with a variety of coverage and prices. This side by side comparison helps individuals find the best bargain.

Join the mission to save money on insurance this year.

Have you started 2012 with vigour or are you still trying to pick up the pace? A few weeks in, now is a good time to do a bit of a sense-check on how those ideas and plans are panning out.

No doubt as January approached you spent a bit of time thinking about your vision, goals and resolutions for your business. The key as we all know is then being able to turn that thinking into results through planning and action, which is where things can start to get tricky.

Unexpected e-mails drop in, tasks over-run and before you know it, you hear yourself saying how busy you are. So, although you may still be steering your ship, it may not be heading in quite the right direction at the speed you had imagined.

So, here are some helpful tips to help you stay focused and on-track:

• Nobody wants to become a ‘busy fool’ but it’s amazing how easily it happens. The key to avoiding it is to avoid fooling yourself about what you’re busying yourself with. Plans and action are vital to achieving results but only if formed and focused properly…
• Before you dive into writing long lists of things to do, start with the end in mind i.e. your goal/objective and ‘plan back’ from there. Then move onto writing your to-do lists, ensuring you focus on the most important and urgent things first.
• Action takes you towards results but is not an end in itself. Ask yourself whether you are more focused on actions or outcomes.
• To keep focused, ask yourself each day: “Am I concentrating on the most important and urgent things first?” Take a moment each week to consider: “What one thing could I do this week that would have most impact on moving me closer to my goal”.
• If you need to revive and refocus, get back in touch with your ‘personal business drivers’ by reminding yourself what all of this is for. Keep that front of mind and ensure all plans start from that point. You’ll find yourself far more motivated if you do!

Profile: Claire Habel is the founder of Inspiring Futures through which she helps her clients develop personal business plans and winning marketing strategies for their businesses.

My definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has doing deals and making money in their blood, who was the kind of kid who was selling sweets to the other kids in primary school. I was perfectly happy with my pocket money. Making any more never occurred to me and anyway it would have meant putting down the books I permanently had my nose in.

My profile in the Wealth Dynamics system, an ‘entrepreneur profiling test’, is Mechanic, someone who excels in putting systems and processes into place and making sure they work efficiently. After initially sulking for turning out to be the most boring out of the eight profiles (knowing that Mark Zuckerberg is a Mechanic makes it no more attractive), the penny dropped that this was why I ran a very profitable cleaning business for 12 years and sold it as a going concern.

I introduced systems for everything, from recruiting staff to checking the loo cleaner and changing dirty dusters, and it allowed me to make exceptional profits. But I think that makes me a good business owner, not an entrepreneur. The definition in my Penguin English Dictionary is ‘somebody who organises, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise’.

Very definitely yes to the first two, but I’m far too cautious for the third. What do you think? Are you an entrepreneur? Do you even like the word or do you think programmes like Dragons Den have given it a bad name?

Fortuitously, yesterday just happened to be the day on which Frome Jelly falls, and here is an artist’s impression of a couple of the attendees in a (rare?) moment of concentration between laughter and cake eating. The artist is Sarah Godsill, who is usually to be found capturing much grander events like weddings.

Jelly brings together random groups of people from many industries and professions. As well as Sarah, yesterday’s Frome Jelly at The Old Church School consisted of a trainer and coach, two IT specialists, a legal consultant, a PR expert, and an international development and human rights professional. Wow! I highly recommend Jelly as a unique way of:

• getting out of the house
• meeting new people you’d otherwise never run into
• picking up bits of advice, particularly on those aggravating IT glitches that can hold you up
• helping out other people and realising that they respect and value the experience and knowledge you possess, which you probably normally dismiss as obvious and commonplace
• clearing up some boring old jobs that have been pushed down the to do list for weeks
• catching up on local gossip
• having a good laugh
• gaining a whole new perspective on your life and work
• eating cake (often homemade, yum)

All this with no requirement to stand up and talk about your business or listen to other people boring on about theirs. I’m pleased to see there’s lots of buzz on Twitter about new groups starting up in places all over the UK. To find out more and for help in setting up your own Jelly, check out my Jelly guide.

I know lots of readers are already committed Jelly-goers. Have I missed out any other Jelly benefits?

‘Too long’ can mean a few hours of struggling with a piece of work, an hour of guilty procrastination, or a minute or two spent reading about other people’s achievements. From the dining table room table or spare bedroom it can quickly start to appear that other people ‘out there’ are cleverer, better connected, lavishly funded and possessed of a dauntingly impressive client list.

Our own horizons and ambitions shrink proportionately – how can we, with our family commitments and our small local clients, possibly compete? By squeezing that time alone to the absolute minimum, I’d say from my own experience.

This time last year I was co-organising The BIG Jelly with Jan Minihane and Fay Easton. It took far more time and energy than any of us anticipated and we experienced setbacks throughout the six months of planning, in fact right up to the day itself. There were many occasions when I wanted to cancel, but regular contact with Jan and Fay kept my spirits up and fortunately there was never a time when all three of us were down at the same time! The event was a huge success and I think all of us were thrilled and amazed by what we’d managed to achieve.

So I believe the best way to achieve your potential when you work from home is to stay connected, whether it’s through coworking, Jelly, networking or forming partnerships with other small businesses. Yes, it means drawing on skills we don’t have to use if we pursue the solitary life, but it also means the opportunity to learn both from other people and what we’re really capable of.

PS As usual this post is written because I need to hear it

There are no sheep at the moment, they were moved after the ram had done his business, so we’re looking forward to their return with lambs in a couple of months. The chickens are the sole occupants of the field and very straggly some of them are. I keep meaning to find out if they are battery farm retirees. If so it must be a mind-blowing experience to come from a cooped -up existence to all this green freedom.

I have see the occasional fly and ladybird in the house throughout the winter and today there are midges dancing in the sunshine over the mill race. Long may this mild weather last.

A has seen a kingfisher flash past, and enjoys the dippers as they chomp up insects in the wall along the river, but the king of the mill is the heron, pictured here from our kitchen window waiting patiently for fish. It’s used to us now and doesn’t fly away immediately when we leave the house, pausing for a while before flapping languidly away upriver to settle on a treetop and wait for us to leave it in peace. I say king, and we always refer to it as a he for some reason, but it could equally well be a sheron, couldn’t it?

I’m quoted today in The Independent and i newspapers in an article by Huma Qureshi about home offices. Huma found two of her case studies on my Home Office Gallery

Read Huma’s article A home office that’s smart and casual and see Rosie and Heather in their home offices.

The major benefit of business self storage is the flexibility. Take, for example, a freelance accountant who works from home. With the run up to the end of the financial year, they find themselves, as you’d expect, inundated with documents from their clients – all needing to be carefully organised, kept safe, and on hand for easy reference.

Our accountant initially rents a storage room for a few months to house the overflow of paperwork (the facility is a quick car ride down the road… the UK now has as many self storage facilities as it does McDonald’s restaurants – around 1,200), but finds the storage space much easier to work in because, as a blank canvass, it can be organised in any way they want.

Suddenly our accountant takes on a new huge client. Good news for the business, and no problem in terms of space either. Our accountant can remove the partition to the next storage room (as it’s available) and create one bigger space – with enough room for a chair and desk, this time too. When all the chaos of the tax returns is complete, the Accountant can either shut down the room completely until next year, or maintain a smaller space.

Of course, you’re probably thinking – how could you leave clients’ important documents “offsite”? But like we said earlier – security is taken very seriously and the perception of storage space as being a large galvanised shed in the middle of nowhere is also no longer true. At Big Yellow, customers are given their own unique PIN, which gives access to the lifts; sensors show when rooms are accessed and even if a room is occupied. 24 hour CCTV, parameter fencing and individually alarmed rooms, means that security is definitely not something you need to worry about. And you probably can’t say the same about your hallway…

Big Yellow Self Storage has more than 70 purpose-built self-storage sites across the UK. Our industrial units to let range from 10 sq ft for a locker up to 500 sq ft, with everything in between. 

But I think there comes a point where the best possible response is to literally get away. For me it comes when my head is stuffed full of all the things I have to do, many of which I can’t progress with (usually due to misbehaving technology) and the thought of doing any of them feels utterly beyond me.

Today I initially got out of the office and did the pile of ironing that’s been waiting for days. I know lots of people hate ironing, but I find it soothing and it cleared my head enough to be able to go back to my desk and get a few small things done.

Then I decided to use the remaining daylight to go into town with A, who had a meeting, and potter about on my own, breathing some fresh air and with luck getting some perspective back. I spent half a hour in the library reading The Times, the only paper you can’t browse online, and then I succumbed to a cappucino chocolate cake that was beckoning to me from the shelf in M&S with its seductive yellow label whispering ‘Reduced £1.’ Very bad I know, but sometimes a home worker’s gotta do what a home worker’s gotta do.

I’ve decided to have an almost work-free evening despite my long to do list. Wish me luck for tomorrow.

PS I pinned this on my Pinterest board a while ago. I really needed it today!