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EARN FROM THE INTERNET
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By July I will have been working from home as a freelance journalist, editor and proofreader for a decade. While I cannot see myself ever being on a payroll again - except perhaps as a part-time consultant - there are a few disadvantages as well as many advantages to being a self-employed homeworker. For those of you about to embark on homeworking, here are a few tips. If you're lucky enough to have one room to devote to your work, make it clear to everyone else that when you're in there you're working, it's not a chatting zone and that the tools of your trade are not to be borrowed for domestic purposes. Tell household members to imagine that, when the door is shut, it's as if you've commuted to a distant workplace. If you have to work in a communal room, then there have to be house rules about when there's an invisible curtain with "do not disturb" embroidered on it separating you from co-habitees. I was lucky - or unlucky - enough to have preceded my years of homeworking with over 30 in office jobs - magazines, a newspaper, public relations consultancies - so I didn't find it difficult to discipline myself into sitting at my desk by 9 or 9.30 every morning, taking an hour for lunch and then at the end of the afternoon saying "that's enough", closing the door and becoming a social and domestic animal elsewhere in the house. That arrangement suits my kind of work because most of my clients operate "office hours" and that's when they expect me to be at the end of the telephone. If you do something for which office hours are irrelevant, it doesn't matter whether you sleep all day and work all night, or work weekends and take a couple of weekdays off. But do work out a timetable of work and play hours and stick to it as rigidly as you can. That's not to say that there aren't times when I find myself working at a weekend to oblige a client, or taking a weekday off. But stolen work or playtime should always be repaid. And it's a must to book a holiday and stick to it. I nearly made the mistake in my early days of working from home of putting an electric kettle in my workroom, and I even thought of having a microwave oven there, so that I could be totally divorced from the domestic part of the house for seven or eight hours a day. But that would be unhealthy: no exercise, no social intercourse with other members of the household at coffee-break time. Personal telephone calls and people ringing the doorbell can be very distracting. You need firm diplomacy to get the "sorry, I'm working" message across. If friends or relatives ring up for a natter while I'm writing an article, I say it's lovely to hear from them, but I've got deadlines to meet, and why don't we fix a time for me to ring them in the evening. I usually add, "I don't want to keep you on the 'phone now, running up your bill at peak rate". If the doorbell rings and I'm on the telephone or in mid-creative flow, I don't answer it. If I do open the door and it's someone selling something (including religion!), conducting a survey or canvassing, I say that I'm in the middle of an important telephone call and, in any case, don't make decisions on the doorstep. The same goes for cold-callers on the telephone. On the other hand, I do pay attention to clients when they telephone during my social hours. My life partner is sworn on pain of death not to borrow the pens and notepad I keep beside our downstairs telephone so that I can take down what the client is saying and appear to be at my desk. Nothing sounds more unprofessional than, "Hold on while I get a pen". My partner has a separate telephone line so that he's not bothered by my business calls and his social ones do not bother me. Expensive paying two standing charges, but worth it. Being your own secretary, filing clerk, bookkeeper, invoicer, bill-payer, post clerk and general dog's body needs time allocation. I estimate I spend an average of half-an-hour a day posting letters, sending e-mails and faxes, and replenishing the photocopier, printer, fax machine, stapler, and so on. Because my clients tend not to be receptive on Monday mornings, that's the time I spend checking bank statements, keeping the filing and bookkeeping up to date, ordering stationery and so on. One of the plus sides of working from home is that no-one can see me, so I don't have to dress up in business clothes every day. When I have to visit a client, I find that choosing clothes appropriate for the occasion is rather enjoyable, whereas I hated having to wear a suit, collar and tie every day when I was an employee. I work faster and more efficiently on my own than ever I did in a noisy open-plan office, but only because of the house-rules I mentioned earlier. But there is a disadvantage to always working alone. Twice, when visiting clients, they've asked me to do something on the spot in their offices. So used am I to silence, that someone's only got to speak and I lose my train of thought or make a mistake. Don't turn your workroom completely into an office or a factory. Inland Revenue and local authorities can be "funny" about residential premises being used for business purposes. Stick an armchair or a sofa in the room, a radio in the corner, and have lots of plants or flowers. Then it becomes a domestic room you happen to do some freelance work in. Your accountant will probably tell you that a proportion of certain domestic expenditure is tax-allowable, and the room will be more pleasant to work in. Above all, nag yourself and laugh at yourself. Treat yourself as if you are your own colleague. Tell yourself off for being untidy and ask yourself permission to open or close the window! That way you don't become too selfish. Clive Simmonds Editorial Solutions e-mail: edsol@lineone.net Telephone: 020 8671 2245 Fax: 020 8671 8544 87 Elm Park, London SW2 2TZ.
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