Hotelling

photo from josephsylvestconst.com

Since I've become a work at home professional, I have totally become paperless.  It's unbelievably liberating.  I can still remember when I worked in an office cubicle with all those binders and all those reports that I have to print out daily, monthly, quarterly. Ugh.

As somebody who never had any love for collecting all those papers, filing is, was, and forever will be my worst nightmare.  I am totally anti-filing!  Now electronic filing is an altogether different animal.  I have no problems with it.  It's just one of those things that come naturally.

Designing My Home Office

I've been designing or at least trying to design my own home office now that I spend more time in the province than in Manila as a work at home professional.  Our house in the province has an extra 12sqm that I can renovate and turn into my own home office.  Unfortunately for me, I don't have any idea how my office should look like.  I tried to conjure what an ideal home office should be but I couldn't get past a table and a chair.  Pretty plebeian I think, so I consulted the great Internet and it has shown me a lot of samples for a great home office.

One of the home office designs I like is this one.  This home office is designed by Christopher J. Grubb of Arch-Interiors Design Group Inc. www.archinteriors.com.  The photo is from www.hgtv.com.

Setting Up Conference Calls With A Bridge Line

photo from itelnet.com

As a work at home professional, every so often, depending on the circumstances, teleconferences is a must. You will have to talk to a group, a team or a committee to provide updates on a project you are working on. In the olden days, you will need to go to the office to use special equipment that can handle multiple callers at once. But even with those equipment that have a multiple-caller feature, sometimes the number of people who can call in is very limited.

The creation of a bridge technology changed all that. A bridge number or a bridge line, is a specific number that participants call and are asked for a participants passcode so they can join a call. The organizer of the meeting and owner of the bridge number or bridge line can then open up the call by entering the leader ID when prompted. Depending on your plan with the bridge line provider, the number of participants can be from a couple of people to hundreds, even thousands, especially if the bridge number is usually used for Global calls.

Work At Home Communication Tools

photo from kollewin.com

As a work at home professional, the most important part of the job is communication. Without it, the powers that be that pays our salary would have no way of knowing what we're up to. This part of our work is the main thing that convinces our employers that we are worth the salaries they are paying us.

Communication can either be oral or written. Written communications pertains to emails, text messages and even twitter- if your company has a strong social media culture. Oral communications will refer to your teleconferences, your one on one with your boss/es, your daily VOIP huddles or just about anything that requires voice communication.