Making a Laptop Your Home Office

work at home mom using laptop outside

If you work from home, or are thinking about working from home, the first step for establishing a home-based business is having a home office. While many people stress about cleaning out the basement or parking their cars in the driveway so that the garage can be refurbished, this is one of the least economically sound things you could do, especially when trying to supplement or replace your income with an at-home business. Having a home office does not mean that you need to have an entire room in your house with a desk, book shelves, files cabinets, and chairs. In fact, all you truly need to create your own home office, if a laptop.

Laptops are great because they are fully transportable so you can take your home office anywhere you go, a home away from home so to speak. You can create a different user profile for just your office work if the laptop serves for personal use as well. This alleviates the hassle of worrying about the kids downloading a virus or accidentally deleting or replacing valuable files. To save you time, money, paper, organizational messes, and to help to environment, try keeping your home office paper-free. This means only using electronic files. Having a printer/scanner is handy of course, but every document you absolutely must print, sign, and return, should be printed, signed, scanned, and saved on your computer.

Like any home office, the key is organization. Spring cleaning doesn’t just apply to tangible organization. Go through your laptop, if using an older profile, and throw out any documents you won’t need. Save any that you want to an external hard drive, discs, or any external memory source. Load the typical office programs, just like you had back when you worked 9-5. Include the Microsoft suite, Adobe Professional, the general accessories, maybe photoshop for more digital art freelancing work. You might need an accounting program or photo program. In any case, keep electronic folders instead of physical folders. Designate one folder for each month or year, and then subcategorize the content with separate folders for specific clients, then specific jobs or job sets. This should all be backed up once saved so that you have multiple copies which cannot be destroyed. If you are using a gmail account for email, then utilize the Google Documents features for online editing between clients and customers, as well as an additional measure of backing up your work.

Just like a physical calendar, keep a calendar either through Google Calendars, or a Microsoft Calendar so that you can monitor your schedule, create tasks lists, and manage your workload just as you would at the office. Being able to visualize everything before you makes accomplishing the work much easier, as does having everything you would need to work in one specific place instead of in numerous filing cabinets, on separate discs, or printed and saved someplace in a pile of papers. Like you would a physical office space, clean out your laptop at the end of each day. Remove any documents which are no longer needed, save those which are. By communicating via electronic emails or chats, all of your transactions and communications between clients and customers are recorded, leaving little room for error or disagreement.

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Making a Laptop Your Home Office

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