Working from home is one of the greatest perks of freelancing. No horrible commute, no noisy office, no stale Tesco sandwiches for lunch – just you, your laptop and your underwear.
Once you’ve got your home office all set up, it’s time to start tweaking your working habits to ensure maximum happiness and productivity. To this end we’ve compiled five services you may want to investigate to make your home office a more pleasant place to be.
If you’re the kind of person who likes listening to music while you work, you could do a lot worse than sign up for a Spotify subscription. While the free service comes with ads, we think a £4.99 Unlimited subscription is a small price to pay for access to a nearly limitless library of the world’s music ad-free. Not only do you get the music, you can also hook your Spotify account up to your Facebook profile to see what your friends are listening to, and send recommendations.
Protip: You can also share entire playlists – so if you’ve knocked up a playlist especially for when you’re coding in PHP or writing your latest erotic novel, you can share the whole thing with your colleagues.
Graze deliver small boxes of assorted healthy goodies to your door every week on a day (or several days) of your choosing, for £3.49 per box with free shipping. They stock everything from wasabi peas to olives, and market themselves as the healthy alternative to a biscuit tin. Graze is one of those services that is so confident you’ll love them they don’t tie you in in any way – you can even just try them for free and walk away if you’re not happy. We tried them a few months ago and have been happy Graze-ers ever since. You can select your preferred menus on their website, and rate items every week to help their system choose things you’ll like.
Protip: Use the code 3FPRWL5T when signing up to get your first box free and help feed the Freelance Advisor team.
Freshly-launched in the UK and offering a far better selection of TV shows and films that incumbent LOVEFiLM, NetFlix is the perfect streaming service to drop in and out of while you get some work done. Need to watch that next episode of Breaking Bad while you take a lunch break? NetFlix is the ideal solution. It’s available more-or-less anywhere you can get Internet (Computers, games consoles, tablets, connected TVs etc.) and even lets you resume watching across devices.
Protip: Use an incognito browser window to avoid the somewhat-intrusive mandatory Facebook login while signing up.
Larder Box is like those traditional farmers market hampers re-thought for the Internet. As opposed to a daily or weekly ready-to-eat service like Graze, Larder Box will send you a box of delicious hand-picked (or hand-made), independently-produced ingredients and products every month, which you can use as inspiration for some easy work from home lunches. Your monthly box will cost you £16.50 if you sign up for a year, or £19.95 if you opt to pay per-month. It’s not just food, either – you’ll sometimes get seeds so you can start your own little kitchen garden.
Protip: Check out Love Your Larder for recipe ideas for the contents of your box.
Getting lost in a a multi-tab Internet wormhole is all too easy when working from home. One minute you’re idly clicking on an article relevant to your work, and five clicks later you’re editing the Wikipedia page of an obscure Twilight character for grammar. The cure for this sort of thing is to limited your content intake during working hours. A great way to do this is to follow one-article-a-day curation service If You Only on Twitter.
Protip: You don’t have to be on Twitter to follow along – you can get a weekly email digest by signing up here.
Know of any other services that make working from home that little bit more enjoyable? Let us know in the comments.
