Whatever the reason, you may one day find yourself telecommuting to work from your apartment, either full- or part-time. Whether you get to do it just once in a while or every day, here are some tips for making your telecommuting easier and more valuable.
Be connected
Make sure you’re accessible to anyone who would normally expect to reach you during work hours. This might mean forwarding your office phone to your home or cell phone (Google Voice allows you to have one number which can forward to different places), answering email quickly, or keeping an instant-messenger window open. If you have an Internet outage at home, you may need to move quickly to your apartment community’s business center or to a nearby cafe with free wireless Internet.
Set your time
Just as in the office, you’ll have to manage interruptions at home. Work out with your family when they can disturb you and when you need to be left alone.
Similarly, set a specific time for lunch or any midmorning or mid-afternoon coffee. Telecommuters are often tempted to snack all day; in a small apartment, with your kitchen and pantry just steps away, the temptation is even greater.
Keep on task
It might be useful to keep a log of tasks you accomplished during the day. If your telecommuting experiment is being conducted under the eye of a distrustful boss, you can use this log later to show how productive you are working from home.
If your laptop is being provided by your employer, assume that your IT department is capable of checking your browsing history. In other words, even though you’re at home, avoid visiting Web sites you wouldn’t surf to at work.
Set up an office
If you’ll be telecommuting regularly, you might find it useful to portion off a part of your apartment as a home office. As appealing as working in your pajamas can sound, it may also help to shower and dress before you sit down at your desk for the day, to help you delineate boundaries between time working and time spent at home. (Also, it allows you to set up a Web cam, if you have one, and hold video conferences while looking professional.)
Know when to call it quits
Finally, enforce quitting time. When you’re working from home, it’s easy to procrastinate and end up having to work late at night, or continue checking email long after you would have left the office. Don’t be afraid to stop and declare yourself off the clock!
