Melissa Rich-Landis Author – Your Virtual Home Office Can Be a Reality!

My home office is professional in so many ways, but it still has the feeling of home.    It is not uncommon for all three household pets (2 dogs and a cat) to be napping in my virtual office in the warm sunshine coming through the window.   But great care has been taken to make certain that the pets are not interfering with my office operations.   For example, my family and I have selected quiet dog breeds – rather than yappy noisy dogs that bark at every whim.    The pets are allowed in my office when it is convenient for me; but otherwise, they have a proper place outside of the office.

Before you establish your home office, you may want to evaluate options for your pets and determine how a virtual office may affect them.

Insurance is such an important factor in working from a virtual home office. We have to have insurance for everything from our health, cars, home and even working from home. I don’t know about you but I have invested a large portion of my income in software, computers and generally all equipment in my virtual home office.

Mention your working environment to your insurance agent to verify you are fully covered in the event something happens to your home. Prepare for catastrophic events by taking out an added insurance binder to protect your working investment. Always prepare for the unknown.

My home office makes working so accessible, comfortable, and convenient.  I absolutely love this working arrangement.  I have loved this arrangement from day one, but I also know that I was well prepared for my new working environment. 

Others have struggled with their home offices – rather than embracing that virtual working agreement.  If you are subject to the home office blues, it indicates that you have not prepared yourself, your family, and your workplace adequately.    To correct that problem, you may want to review that arrangement and make appropriate changes.  Hopefully, my book will be helpful to you in formulating your plan.

Working from home requires more virus protection since working from home in your virtual office is your livelihood. You are the sole provider of your empire including all necessities such as virus protection and need to make sure you are fully covered. There are many kinds of protection out there. I personally use Avast. Avast is free to the home user and offers all of the same bells as whistles as McAfee and Norton.

Virus protection is very important to have working and up to date while working from a virtual environment since it is not only your work but keeps the your working information secure. If you lose your computer due to a virus or leak of information by an unauthorized outside source, you could be without your working tools for days or weeks. Prepare for the unknown. Murphy’s law states” Anything can go wrong, will go wrong”. Take time to be prepared and protect your family and virtual home office position.

With my home office, I have always plugged in to the latest technology.   I have constant access to my latest emails, my recent voice mails, and incoming faxes – all in the same place.  My voice mails and faxes are sent to me via email, so I can quickly view all incoming correspondence in one central location – my email inbox.  Chapter 16 highlights the use of technology in relationship to a virtual home office.  

If you would like order your signed copy of the book title Your Virtual Home Office Can Be A Reality!, please visit our website.

I find this topic amusing. You hear about people that work from home in their pajamas and house shoes, but I cannot see my self as motivated if I crawl out of bed in the morning and start work. My day starts as any job would.  I get up at a set time, take a shower and get dressed in appropriate clothing for working from home and start my work day.

Motivation is different for everyone. My motivation is treating my work from home position just like a job that I would leave my home to go to the office.  The only difference is my commute time. The only traffic jam I encounter is the dog lying across the hallway to my virtual office.

I subscribe to several work-at-home news feeds and I am always interested in reading the perspectives from my work at home colleagues.  However, in the last week or so, I have noticed several articles where the author viewed their home office in a negative light.  It appeared that the authors were not well prepared in developing their home office environment; and thus, were bombarded with a continuous flow of family interruptions.   

If you need help in planning your home office or working with your family to minimize distractions, you might want to review chapter 14 of the book.

There are 2 different types of job classifications for working from home. One is the employee or w-2 worker and then there is the IC or Independent Contractor. Why would you want to be an Independent Contractor? The pluses to being an IC are the flexibility to work when and where you want to. You are in control of your hours and how much you want to work.

You can also decide if you would like to work for multiple companies or if you would like to contract with a company and then outsource your work to someone else.

The downside to being a contractor is that when you are not working in your virtual home office, you are not getting paid. Contractor status can be feast or famine.  Learning to budget for the lean times is beneficial for budget stability.

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