Today my Work from home schedule followed an unusual plan. Usually I work from home throughout the day, normally tied up with Online jobs of different kinds, often I am writing marketing copy for clients. Today however I had two customer meetings in my diary which got me out of the house for the best part of the day. It is a pleasant change whenever this happens but it works far better if it’s well organised.
In this instance there were a couple of writing tasks I had left to get out of the way in order to achieve a pressing deadline. It is temptation to organise this work for later on, once the meetings are done and upon return to base. However I have been doing work from home long enough to have learned that this is a mistake. Meetings take longer than scheduled, or start late, or both. Often this is somewhat draining, especially if they are important, say for example you are trying to recruit a potential new customer. You can find yourself getting home late and worn out and in no fit state to write properly. So today I set my morning call for 6 a.m. and completed a three hour creative effort before getting going.
An additional spin off of this was that it meant organising my meetings for rather later in the day, when the traffic had calmed down somewhat. It is a real advantage when you work from home that you miss the daily rush hour. Don’t ruin that by organising meetings early in the day and placing yourself back into the rush hour traffic with no good reason.
I concluded my first meeting by lunchtime and I had planned a bit of a gap before the next one. When the weather is nice it’s pleasant to undertake a little exercise, today that is a walk along the river in Durham, where my second meeting was to take place.
Arrived home before 5 p.m. again missing the worst of the rush hour, and the remainder of the day is my own.