| According
to my wife, my business may not actually be home based. True,
I have no corporate office to which I go.
True,
I often do work at home, and can work at home whenever I choose.
But
- being able to work at home is not the same as having to work at home.
At
least a couple of days a week - and sometimes every day of the week - I spend
all or part of my working day in one coffee shop or another, sipping java and
pounding away on my laptop computer.
In
the past few weeks, I´ve set up shop beside the harbor in Annapolis, Maryland,
at Café Commercial in downtown Madrid, Spain, in a bakery in Frankfurt,
Germany, and in a suburban Barnes & Noble just outside Boston, Massachusetts.
And that´s just a partial list.
In
every case, I had a permanent or travel ¨home¨ that I could have been
using, but I preferred getting out into the community.
I find my productivity
improves for several reasons when I exit the house and move to a quiet café.
These include:
1)
No distractions from family. One of the perennial struggles of the home based
business is drawing sharp lines between work and home. Your homelife can detract
from your ability to get work done, both because your family may feel free to
intrude on you, and because you may be tempted to spend time with your family.
Getting out of the house to the relative anonymity of a café solves that
problem.
2)
No internet access. When I´m at home, plugged into DSL, it´s altogether
too tempting to go surfing under the pretense of researching or learning. Out
of the house, the emails I need to respond to travel with me in my Outlook inbox,
and I can more easily buckle down to answering them.
3)
Fresh Air and Exercise. I live in cities, for the most part. When I head out,
unless it´s actively pouring rain, I walk to my café of choice. It´s
not much in the way of exercise, but even a half hour walk to and fro is enough
to clear my mind and give me a chance to rearrange priorities in my mind. Even
without the exercise, sometimes just a change in scenery is enough to help start
my productive juices flowing.
Television
and housecleaning are not much in the way of temptations for me, but if they were,
avoiding those would provide additional incentives to get out.
For
me, it all works because my notebook computer is the heart and sole of my business.
Every important file, every major tool, resides on that notebook hard drive. So
long as I have it with me, I´m good to go.
Top
accessories for someone like me include a cable
and lock so I can secure my laptop to a table at whichever café I light
at, and extra batteries. The cable won´t protect you from a determined thief
who comes prepared with a cable cutting tool, but it does stop the opportunistic
snatch and run kind of thief. It only takes a moment of inattention for your computer
to disappear if you don´t have it secured in some way.
Extra
batteries can extend your time out, and allow you to choose tables or cafes without
handy power supplies. Odds on, you will save money on the battery for your laptop
if you shop via eBay
as opposed to your local computer store.
If,
like me, you are computer dependent, some kind of mobile computer is key for broadening
your horizons. If cash is tight, and if, like most of us, your work tends toward
word processing and email, an older model without all the newest bells and whistles
can work just fine. Great deals on used computers are sometimes available at eBay
or from vendors such as Off-Lease
Computers.
Another
option, which I have often used with great satisfaction, is to use a keyboard
with a Palm Pilot or similar PDA. My Palm is the introductory level M105 which
cost me about $100 after rebate, and I got the keyboard via eBay
from an internet discount house for about $50. When I want to travel light, it
gives me full word processing capability that fits into a coat pocket.
I´m
told that before the computer era, people did just fine with pencils, notepads
and accordion file folders. If that´s your working style, you are even more
set up to go.
Here´s
the takeaway point: if you find yourself slipping at all into a rut, consider
getting out and about. The change of scenery - even if it´s just to a table
in the back yard - may help spark some creativity and enhance your productivity. |