Small Office, Home Office Information

Yesterday was one of those days when the plans never quite matched reality. We had both had a full-on day on Monday and yesterday we both just wanted to be in coast-mode but of course that was never going to happen.

First we got the chance to pick up a monster of a computer that we could use as a server for our home office. So it came home and my office got some of the tidying that I talked about earlier and I spent quite a few hours re-organising cables, connections, peripherals and rubbing my head every time I banged it on one of the legs of my desk.

Then there was the urgent work that came in from a regular client who wanted us to “write a few words about …”. Whenever I see him use that term in an order I know that what he really means is “here is several days worth of work and I need it yesterday”

Oh well computer technician, networking guru and systems administrator one day and text writer the next - life in this small business is rarely boring and flexibility is the key to staying sane

Last week we made two posts about setting up a home office in which Toni and I each gave our own five tips for setting up a home office. Here are the links - Her Five Tips for Setting Up a Home Office and His Five Tips for Setting Up a Home Office.

You will notice that we posted a photo of Toni’s office desk but you won’t find one of mine when it came to my five tips and that’s because it’s just too messy and cleaning it up is going to take a quite a while.

I have anice big desk, it currently holds four 17 inch flat screen monitors, one computer, a sound system, two keyboards and four large piles of paper along with numerous pens, keys, loose change and assorted other junk. I would like to laugh it off by saying that a tidy desk is the sign of sick mind but, in reality, a mess like I have on my desk is not good for productivity and that’s not good for business.

I came across 10 Tips for Keeping Your Desk Clean and Tidy at LifeClever and it’s encouraged me to do something about the mess. It might just encourage you to do something about your mess too.

If you have a blog as part of your small business you will understand how comments work. Most blog scripts allow you to prevent all comments from appearing until the blog owner has a chance to vet them to weed out the incredible about of spam that tries to get in via the comments.

Of course there are trusted posters who have shown the blog owner that their comments aren’t spam and their comments go straight in.

However, I saw a blog owner learn a nasty lesson this weekend. On Friday he made a post that had a relevant photo of his wife included in the post. Late on Friday night a trusted poster posted a very nasty and very vindictive comment about the blog owners wife.

Unfortunately the blog owner didn’t see it because he’s a guy who likes to get away from his computer on weekends. He finally removed the comment late on Saturday after a friend emailed him about it.

So there are two important lessons for you if you’re a blog owner:

1. You might have trusted posters but some are not as trustworthy as you might hope and

2. Running a blog really is a seven day a week occupation

Welcome to Friday’s Links - this is a new weekly category where I’ll list some of the links I’ve found over the last week that should be helpful for small business and people who run a home office.

So here are the Friday Links for this week:

PDF Online - converts a variety document types into PDF format for free. There is a paid version too.

Telegraphics - Free plugins for Photoshop, Illustrator and other software.

How a Colour Blind Person Sees the World - there are some interesting thoughts raised by a person who is colour blind.

I have no idea where my mother got that saying but it’s highly unlikely that she ever did spit about anything. However that saying pretty much sums up the week that Toni and I have been having with our small business.

So far the score is one 19 inch flat screen monitor, two hard drives and one CD-ROM - all gone in a week.

Fortunately no data was lost and no spitting took place

Yesterday I have you Toni’s tips for setting up a home office and you can find them at Her Five Tips for Setting Up a Home Office. Now here are my five tips for setting up a home office.

1. Power Outlets – you can’t have too many power outlets and Murphy’s Law dictates that you will always have one less than you really need.

2. Suitable desk or table – it’s nice to lash out and buy a fancy desk but you may not need that at all. Toni works from a very nice desk (that was a cow to assemble) while I work from a cheap table that we bought at a hardware store. It’s longer than a normal desk and I can fit all the junk on it I need.

3. Phone lines – in today’s world of cordless phones you will still need at least one phone line in your home office – for the modem that allows you to connect to the Net.

4. Location – your home office needs to be in a quiet part of the house away from all the noise that the kids will make. It’s hard to produce quality work when the kids are on the rampage.

5. A good chair – it’s an investment in your future. The more uncomfortable you are the more your productivity will drop. You should also be prepared to replace that chair every 12 months … or even more frequently. Once you feel that your chair fits you like a glove then it’s time to ditch it and buy a new one.

So now you have our ten points to consider when setting up your home office. There are certainly others as well but they were the ones that were at the top of the list for us.

For those of you who are not regular readers let me say that Toni and I have been working from home for over five years and in that time we have identified a number of things that we see as important considerations when setting up a home office.

Over a cup of coffee on the weekend we sat down and each of us listed five of the most important factors to look at when planning your home office. Interestingly each of us chose four things that the other did not. So today here is Toni’s list of 5 tips for setting up a home office:

1. Desk position – I don’t like my back to the door and you should avoid placing your desk in such a way that direct sunlight falls across it.

2. Make sure you have an ergonomic chair – it will undoubtedly cost more money but if you spend a lot of time at your desk it is very definitely a major investment in the future success of your business.

3. Space for Shelving and Drawers – every office needs shelving and it needs drawers too. Unfortunately the style of office desk that most of us might choose will probably not have enough drawers so make sure there is space in the room you want to use for your office for more drawers.

4. Heating and cooling – it’s vital that your office is warm enough to work in during winter and cool enough to work in during summer. Fans and heaters will be important so make sure that you can fit them in without having everything blow off the desk when the fan is on and scorching the furniture when the heater is on.

5. Light and airy – gloom tends to lead to you feeling down. Our second home office was in a room that incorporated a lot of dark, heavy timberwork. Fortunately it also had big windows that let a lot of light in.

And to show you how Toni’s office looks here is a photo:

It may not look all that neat with the mess of cables hanging off the back of everything but it certainly is functional. There are extra drawers tucked away under the desk and a large bookcase is off to the right of the picture.

Tomorrow I’ll share my 5 tips for setting up a home office.

I guess the title says it all, you should never say “Never!” because never may not be as set in concrete in the future as it might seem right now.

Dell recently announced that they were going to be offering their servers and PCs with an AMD processor. In the past Dell relied entirely on Intel products but over the last few years AMD have been able to at least match Intel on price, quality and performance so moving to AMD is a wise choice.

However, not all that long ago Dell were making pronouncements such as:

“There’s not enough performance advantage.”

“We need lots of chips, more than AMD can produce.”

“Introducing another chip sullier into our exclusive partnership with Intel would complicate our lean manufacturing line.”

“Our customers simply don’t want AMD’s products.”

“We’re the most successful PC company on the planet and we don’t have AMD. Could I do it” Yeah, but why?” (Dell’s CEO in late 2004)

So what changed? Dell’s competitors began offering their products with a choice of Intel or AMD and suddenly ‘never’ became a relative term.

Let me preface this by saying that I get a big kick out of working with young people who have a real desire to make something of themselves … to have a go (a good Australian colloqualism) … to break out of the teenage mould and dare to face challenges. And I’ve done quite a bit of work with kids like that over the years and over the years I have seen some brilliant kids face their fears, overcome them and take big steps forward in their personal development.

So when a young person asks me for help I’m rarely say no. Wednesday was a day like that. A young guy from one of the local high schools asked me to look over a busy plan he had to put together for a school assignment.

Not a problem, I could do that so I picked it up this morning and brought it home to read. That was when I found that I had to more than just ‘look it over’. I had to answer 10 questions and the answers were basically a critique of the business plan.

Basically the business plan was a dream … a vision of world of business that simply does not exist … and a dream that would never fly in the real world.

The questions gave me very little room for some creative tap-dancing so what do I do? Do I give answers that are in alignment with the real world or do I step into his dream world and tell him that it’s a wonderful business plan?

When I need to find answers to questions like that I tend to pace … and Toni knows just to let me go.

I don’t know what you would have done but in the end I came down on the side of telling it like it really is.

I’ve returned the business plan now with the questions answered and he probably regrets asking me to critique it because now it goes on to the teacher for marking. But I couldn’t handle the fact that if I had joined him in his dream then one day he might have tried to go into business for himself based on something that I had said that was less than honest.

But somehow I just feel that I’ve let him down.

If your small business is using Google Checkout or you are thinking of adding that payment option to your small business then perhaps you should think again.

It seems that one major retailer has already dropped Google Checkout and others are encountering serious problems in getting payments approved.

You can find the full story at Levi’s Thinks Google Checkout is Pure Pants