Home Office Snap Shots | Home Office Warrior

Home Office Snapshots — Kris Rowlands (Fresh Focus)

Jul 26, 2008

Kris Rowlands is this weeks featured home office in Home Office Snapshots. Kris has a great blog at Fresh Focus and she can be followed on twitter at @FreshFocusKris provided the snapshot and a description of her office:

This office is shared by a casual computer user and a business computer user, so this is the “business” side.My desk doesn’t have too much on it……monitor, surge protector, two lamps (I don’t like overhead lighting for computer work: I’d rather user directional lighting), and my post it notes (which don’t get much use anymore, now that I have my Circas). You can see my PC tower over on the left, which is decorated with gift bows from my last birthday (my favorite colors!) as well as my paper shredder there on the floor. On the right is my day job laptop (it’s an itty bitty thing). I tend not to like dark colors for an office - I want things to be light and bright. THe wood paneling on the walls was here when we moved in, and the office will be the last to be renovated, so for now I have to deal with the honey color walls.We took the sliding doors off the closet, and we have put the printer in there, one of my file cabinets ( that stores office supplies), and other storage bins and drawers. Behind me sit my rabbit, Pixie and next to him is the fa x machine. All in all, it’s a cozy office that is productive for me, keeps me close to my animals, and is just as I like it!

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You can purchase Kris Rowland’s new e-book by using this button:

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Home Office Snapshot — Mark Shead (Productivity501)

Jul 19, 2008

Mark Shead of Productivity 501 provided me this week’s feature snapshots of his home office. Good grief I wish mine looked this clean and neat. Mark is a Mac user and that puts him on the top of my list.Mark gave me a great description of how he works:

As far as what I do:

My company provides business consulting services for organizations that are looking to leverage technology to be more efficient. We focus on solutions that are measurable and provide rapid feedback. The services we provide are very broad and include things such as: statistical analysis for marketing firms, redesigning a software engineering teams workflow, custom software development, medium size ERP/CRM implementations, and handling the technology side of mid-size business mergers.

Since I live in a rural area, most of my work is done remotely. I make frequent use of Connect Now paired with a high quality video camera in order to visually connect with clients all over the world. This helps me get “face time” with people I may only see once or twice each year. I recently hired an assistant who works in my home office with me. She helps free me up to concentrate on the areas where I add the most value for clients.

One of the benefits of working from home is choosing your geographical location. For awhile I worked from Mexico and with VoIP clients didn’t even have to know I was out of the country. My setup is designed to make it easy to pack up and travel and we frequently speed weeks at a time in Colorado, Texas and other areas. As long as there is a good internet connection I’m able to work.

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Home Office Snapshot — Stephanie Kimbro (VLOtech)

Jul 12, 2008

Stephanie Kimbro is another one of those who just gets it. Stephanie is one of the owners of Virtual Law Office Technology, LLC and she uses her own technology to run her own virtual law office at Kimbro Legal Services.

When I say Stephanie get its, she is using and leveraging technology to create a wonderful balance in her personal life as well as her professional life. By using the very technology she is making available to other lawyers, she can run her law practice from the comfort of her home or her porch as seen in the photo.

Stephanie provided the following brief description of her “summer office” and the photo.

“My daughter likes to play outdoors so I set up shop in the rocking chairs or front steps on our front porch with my lap desk, Mac Notebook and coffee. Everything I need is on my Mac or the virtual law office. For the most part, all of my resources (downloads for new clients, client case files and docs) are stored in the file library on my vlo. With the web-based vlo, I can go from working with a client to checking on client invoices and handling other administrative tasks. With this nice weather we are having by the coast right now it is great to be able to go outside and enjoy it.“

Thank you Stephanie for showing how leveraging technology can allow someone to provide quality services to their clients even from their own front porch.

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Home Office Snapshots — Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann (DEVONtechnologies)

Jun 23, 2008

Eric Boehnisch-Volkmann heard my request on twitter and came through with his “home office”. Eric is President of DEVONtechnologies who has one of the coolest applications DEVONthink™.

As Eric states, “We’re making Mac software for smart document and information management as well as AI-powered web search. Our company is completely home-office based as we see this as the future for small companies like ours, but we maintain an official office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”

Eric sent the two photos of his home office away from his home office. “I usually spend two to three hours here every other day. In our small German town of Bietigheim-Bissingen we have a number of nice locations with great coffee that offer free WiFi or a T-Online hot spot where I can log-in free of charge.” In the café I find the peace to work on concentration-intensive projects like documentation, web site, or design away from the turbulences of my family with three kids. In addition I meet friends and business partners there, e.g., our graphic designer.

I do some of my best work at my own favorite coffee shop. It was nice to see someone else who’s business is centered around the home office also use the coffee shop as a place to go.

UPDATE: Just found out DEVONagent was picked as a Staff Pick over at Apple. Not bad for a company that is “completely home-office based.” Way to go Eric!!!

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Home Office Snapshots — Matt Craven

Jun 14, 2008

Matt Craven, contributor at the Blog Herald sent me his home office setup photo. Below is the photo of a Mac fan too. And a description of his office he provided too.

I’m still a Mac user. My current main computer is a 17″ Macbook Pro tricked out with the glossy screen, max RAM (3GB in this one), and the largest hard drive they were selling in March 2007 when I purchased it. This is my first Intel mac. I actually had no plans to purchase this but my trusty 15″ Powerbook G4 from the winter of 2005 died during a client trip in Dallas.The Macbook Pro is connected in my office to the granddaddy of all monitors - a 30″ Apple Cinema Display. The laptop itself sits on an elevated stand just to the left of the monitor providing me with an enormous amount of screen real estate.To the right of the Macbook setup is a Dell XPS workstation running Windows XP with Dual 20″ LCDs. I primarily use this for gaming, though the dual monitor setup and PC software is sometimes needed for specific applications. For example, I keep the books for Bryghtpath LLC (my company) using Quickbooks Pro from Intuit, which simply doesn’t have the same functionality in its Mac version as its original PC version does have.I also have an older Powermac G4 tower on the other side of the office that serves as an iTunes server, a backup server, and the main podcasting machine. It’s too old for much else at this point.The entire office is backed up to a 1TB RAID5 Appliance from Infrant.