Working from Home
A Third Age Small Business feature
by our Business & Employment Editor

Working from Home would seem the most sensible option for any Third Ager setting up a new Small Business. Unless your business is in highstreet retailing, requires a factory or necessitates a public face, Working from Home makes practical and financial sense.

Why pay for rented office space when you could either utilize a space in your home or create office space in the garden? Why burden yourself with two lots of overheads when one will suffice? Why suffer the expense and aggrevation of travelling too and from a rented office when the furthest you need to travel is to the bottom of your own garden?

Of course Working from Home has its disadvantages. You need to be disciplined – it might be Wimbledon fortnight or a beautifully sunny day but you cannot afford to allow yourself to be diverted by such things. You also need to avoid household distractions such as children and chores.

To that end, a garden building adapted to become an office or a purpose built garden office would be preferable to purloining a room in the house. It’s also much easier to draw a clear distinction between work and homelife. As someone who has experienced both, I can categorically say it is much less tempting to ‘just spend an hour in the office’ if the office is tucked away at the bottom of the garden as opposed to a spare room in the house. A garden office might only be a few strides away, but it’s psychologically so much easier to lock it up and forget work than just walking next door to a spare room. That having been said, not everyone has that option so we’ll return to the subject of Garden Offices later.

Wherever you work in your own home, a dedicated business telephone line, whilst not essential, is inexpensive enough to justify in order to separate personal from business calls. And if you want to keep your home address distinct from your business address, then you can either set up a PO Box or use a business mailing service – a Virtual Office.

So what are the major pros and cons of Working from Home?

The Pros:
Lower overheads
Flexible working hours
Greater degree of control over your life
No commuting
Better quality of life

The Cons:
Requires discipline
The need to avoid procrastination
Less human contact which some people find less conducive to work
Difficulty in separating homelife from business environment

To learn more about Working from Home and getting more out of life by making money at home we can thoroughly recommend Work from Home by Judy Heminsley. This excellent book will: *Put you in control so you can create the ideal environment for your own temperament and circumstances. *Help you to discover whether you and your work are suited to working from home. *Help you to beat procrastination and use your time effectively. *Show you how to maintain a professional image even if you work from the kitchen table. *Tell you how to overcome isolation and deal confidently with any crisis. *Help you to separate work from home and gain support from your family and friends. *Get the most out of homeworking by sharing the experiences of the author and a diverse range of homeworkers from designers and B&B owners to salesmen and builders. *Explore their solutions to common challenges and save time, effort and money by not making the mistakes they made.

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