Today my Work from home experiences took a slightly different turn. Often I work from home all day, normally carrying out Online jobs of one kind or another, often I am authoring promotional copy for customers. Today however I had a couple of customer meetings in my diary which got me out and about for the best part of the day. It is a welcome break whenever this happens but it works far better when it is properly organised.

In this instance there were the odd writing duties I needed to sort out in order to achieve a next day deadline. It is temptation to schedule these tasks for later in the day, once the meetings are done and upon return to base. However I have done work from home long enough to have learned that this is a mistake. Meetings run over time, or don’t start on time, or both. Often this can be very draining, especially if they are important, say for example you are trying to impress a prospective new customer. You can end up arriving home late and tired and unable to write productively. So today I set my alarm clock for 6 a.m. and completed a three hour creative shift before getting going.

An additional spin off of this was that it meant setting up my meetings for a bit later in the day, when the traffic had calmed down to some extent. It is a real advantage when you work from home that you miss the daily traffic jams. Don’t spoil that by organising meetings early morning and placing yourself back into the rush hour traffic with no good reason.

I had my first meeting out of the way by 1 p.m. and had a short gap before the next one. When the weather is nice it is nice to undertake a little exercise, in this case a walk by the river in Durham, where my next meeting was located.

Arrived to base before 5 p.m. again avoiding the worst of the rush hour, and the rest of the day is my own.