Free eBook on How to Design the Ultimate Home Office

Do you have a messy, disorganized and cluttered workspace? If so then I have great news for you – your solution is at hand thanks to an eBook titled How to Design the ULTIMATE Home Office and it’s sure to help you whip your office into shape!

This book was written by Hassan Osman who writes a blog called TheCouchManager.com about working remotely. Being we share a passion for mobile work he sent me a copy of his book to review and I was very impressed with his approach and envious of the photos of his very organized home office.

He normally sells this book for $19.95 but he generously offered to make it available free for one week to members of The Anywhere Office tribe.

How to Design the ULTIMATE Home Office is a downloadable ebook that will help you transform your home office into a highly efficient space. It contains over 40 pictures that show you what organizers and tools to use and where to best position them for maximum impact.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Where to put all that clutter that’s been lingering around
• What types of budget-friendly organizers to use for your reference files and documents
• How to position everything on your desk to save you time and increase your productivity
• Examples of applying the GTD principles on organizing all your “offline” stuff

To get your free copy visit this link and  sign up for his “Managing Virtual Teams” newsletter and you’ll receive 2 FREE ebooks:

• “How To Design the ULTIMATE Home Office”  ($19.95 value) – a GTD-friendly guide with over 40 pictures that will help you clear up your office clutter and create a more productive workspace
• “Time Zone Meeting Coordination in 7 Easy Steps” - a free guide that will help you schedule virtual team meetings across different time zones without losing your hair (includes a downloadable Excel spreadsheet)

This is a limited-time offer exclusively for The Anywhere Office tribe, so make sure you sign up and download the books before Friday, Aug 17 at 9pm PST!

 

2nd Annual Telework Week March 5-9, 2012: Highlights in The Anywhere Office

Today marks the beginning of the second annual  Telework Week hosted by Telework Exchange. The goal is to encourage people and organizations to pledge to telework during this week in order to get a first hand account of just how flexible, simple, and economical it can be to work in this mode. Already, more than 64,000 pledges have signed up for Telework Week, collectively saving more than $4.7 million in commuting costs in just one week.

I thought this event was a great opportunity to look back on my own year and review what we have accomplished to champion telework here in The Anywhere Office. Early in the year we published a free white paper called, WORK UNCHAINED: Workshifting and the Competitive Edge of The Anywhere Office®‘- this 16 page special report details:

• Why workshifting provides a critical competitive edge
• Common mistakes to avoid when enabling a mobile workforce
• Best practices for evaluating your organization before implementing a workshifting strategy
• How to assess information, communication and collaboration needs
• Key tools to consider when implementing a workshifting program

Then I was fortunate to be included on a panel of  experts along with Jeff Zbar and Rachel Hastings to produce a teleseminar entitled, Telecommuting in the 21st Century: How to Implement or Improve Virtual Teams and Flexible Work in Your Organization which I turned into a free 13 part audio series. These 13 sessions comprise over an hour of informative content and will provide you with all the information you need to help you evaluate if telecommuting is a good fit for your business and how to get started or improve your virtual team work.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly for me, I redeveloped my virtual team leadership webinar –  The Art of Virtual Leadership. It now contains new and updated material and for the first time it’s available on-demand on any device that has Internet access. This 3-hour concise go-at-your-own pace course is packed with easy-to-understand overviews, key takeaways, action plans, checklists, tips, audio interviews, best practices, steps to take, proven strategies and more.

So, I’m proud of what we’ve created and contributed this year – and I hope you all can find some useful guidance and advice in this information. In order to celebrate Telework Week 2012 in the hopes that more organazations and individuals will realize the tremendous benefits of telecommuting, workshifting, and virtual teamwork, I am going to give away 2 FREE enrollments to The Art of Virtual Leadership webinar (registration is currently $157).

In order to enter the contest and be eligible to win your free enrollment you must do the following 2 steps:

1. Follow me on Twitter – @philmontero (I share information on telework, virtual teams, mobile technology, and tips on how to work in The Anywhere Office so I promise it’ll be worth it!)
2. Send out the following Tweet (you can copy and paste it into twitter or use the tweet button below):
   RT @philmontero: It’s #telework week – visit The Anywhere Office for free resources – win a $157 webinar. http://bit.ly/twk2012 #tlwk2012

To make it even easier simply click this tweet button Tweet
and you will be taken to your twitter page with the text already in place so you can just click SEND.

I am also offering a 20% discount to anyone who enrolls for The Art of Virtual Leadership during Telework Week 2012 (let’s say through Sunday March 11th). Use coupon code telework2012 in the shopping cart while registering for the webinar to receive an additional 20% off of the already discounted $197 registration fee.

Have a great Telework Week, let’s shoot for a telework MONTH next year…

Phil Montero
Founder of TheAnywhereOffice.com

Follow me on Twitter
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Connect with me on LinkedIn

 

Links to Resources Mentioned Above:

Work Unchained Report: http://youcanworkfromanywhere.com/workunchained-specialreport.htm
Telecommuting in the 21st Century Audio: http://www.theanywhereoffice.com/telecommuting-in-the-21st-century
Art of Virtual Leadership Webinar: http://www.youcanworkfromanywhere.com/avl/

3 Secrets to Turning Your Office Into The Anywhere Office – webinar replay & follow-up Q&A post

Late last year, I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar for Cisco where I shared my three secrets for turning your office into The Anywhere Office®. In the presentation I discussed how the world of work has changed and that whether you’re a freelancer, entrepreneur, telecommuter or remote worker, there are smart ways to work without an office.

In case you missed it – you can watch the replay of  3 Secrets to Turning Your Office Into The Anywhere Office®. In this webinar I share three secrets to mobilize your workstyle and make your business and projects more flexible. These simple steps will allow you to work wherever and whenever you want.

We had a lot of questions during the webinar and not all were answered, so I answered the bulk of them in a 2 part guest blog post I did for the WebEx blog. There were some excellent questions – here are the links so you can check it out:

The Anywhere Office: Collaborating While Working Remotely (Part 1)

In this post I answer these questions:

• How can you stay connected with workmates and interact with your team in a virtual office while avoiding feeling isolated?
• What is the best way to convince ‘old school’ management that this will better for yourself and the company?
• How do you keep the team spirit and consistency in the quality of work when everyone is working from home?
• How do you convince a customer to trust in remote management of his/her data?

If you’re currently a mobile worker, or you’re starting to get more involved with virtual teamwork and remote collaboration the tools and strategies I discuss in this Q&A will help. The key to success is embracing the change about what defines work and taking the time to really think about how business gets done.

So check out the webinar and part 1 and part 2 of my Q&A blogpost on the Webex blog.

If you have further questions, you can post them as comments below or over at the webex blog and I’ll answer them there.

3 Secrets to Turning Your Office Into The Anywhere Office – FREE Webinar

I’m excited to be hosting a free webinar with Cisco/Webex on November 17th titled “3 Secrets to Turning Your Office Into The Anywhere Office®“ as part of their No Office Required series.

Business as usual no longer involves working in a centralized office at set times. Whether you’re a freelancer, entrepreneur, telecommuter or remote worker, modern workflow is far more dynamic and individual. There are smart ways to work without an office.

As you know, as a reader of this blog, I’ve created a blueprint for virtual work that I call The Anywhere Office®. In this webinar I’ll shares three secrets to mobilize your workstyle and make your business and projects more flexible. These simple steps will allow you to work wherever and whenever you want.

I’ll show you how to:

• Make your work location independent
• Improve communication and keep people connected
• Manage a virtual team, distributed project group, or ebusiness across time and distance

This recent Cisco interactive infographic  serves as  a great visual representation of The Anywhere Office® concept I’ve been talking about for the last decade and will be discussing on this upcoming webinar. It shows the current and future state of workplace mobility. As Cisco states “Long commutes and being in an office at a certain time with limited flexibility is gradually becoming a thing of the past. The future will see an increase in workplace mobility creating the “anywhere office,” a place where employees can work anytime from anywhere.” By 2013, mobile workers will make up 35 percent of the worldwide workforce. While that leaves out over half of the global workforce, it shows us a new world of opportunity.  Are you shifting your business to “The Anywhere Office®?”

Who should attend

This webinar is perfect for anyone who must coordinate with co-workers, clients, vendors, or contractors across time and distance: project managers, program directors, team leaders, project coordinators, or anyone in a leadership role for a virtual team or distributed project group. This includes freelancers, entrepreneurs, telecommuters and remote workers.

Make sure to signup today and reserve your spot.  Even if you can’t make the live event you will be emailed a link to the recording so you can still benefit from all the tips and strategies I’ll be sharing.

I’m looking forward to a fun webinar and I hope to see you there!

Do You Know the Secrets for Getting Approval to Telecommute? Free Webinar & Interview

I had the pleasure of recently interviewing Pat Katepoo – a flexible work advisor and the founder of WorkOptions.com. Pat is the developer of a series of Flexible Work Proposal Packages which have equipped thousands of professionals to negotiate the flexible work arrangement they want.

On September 13, she’s presenting a free webinar called Telecommute Now! How to Get Fast Approval to Work from Home where she will be sharing secrets for the easiest way to ask for a flexible work arrangement and get your managers to say YES.

In our short interview Pat and I talk about:

• the importance of knowing how to negotiate the flexible work arrangement you want and how to ask with confidence.
• the different shapes and sizes of flexible work: including telecommuting, compressed workweek, part-time, and job sharing.
• the three-ingredient formula that gets managers to agree to a telework request — even where there are barriers. She also reveals a preview of two barriers that keep people from asking for a flexible work arrangement.

Listen to this 15 minute interview to learn more:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:50 — 13.6MB)

Pat’s expert advice on flexible work has been featured in several national publications including The Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, and also on NBC Nightly News. I’ve been following Pat’s work in this space for the last 15 years and we first spoke many years ago when I was working on my book – Lose Your Commute. Read more

Mobile Printing with FedEx Office Print & Go (win a free test kit)

If you’re a mobile worker on the go, one of the challenges you’ve probably faced is how to print your documents when you’re on the move.  Maybe you’re on the road meeting with clients, or on your way to make a presentation, and need to get some handouts or a report printed.  Well here’s a solution – a great service I tested recently from FedEx Office called Print & Go. It lets you print from your mobile device or USB flash drive at more than 1600 FedEx Office locations. I was very impressed with how well it worked, so I want to explain what it does and how it works as I know for many of you it’s probably just what you have been looking for.

Let me start by letting you know, in the spirit of transparency, that I was contacted by the folks at FedEx as they were looking for bloggers in the mobile work space to review this new service.  They sent me a “test kit” which included a 512 MB USB flash drive pre-loaded with instructions on how to use the service and a $25 FedEx Office gift card to cover the cost of anything I chose to print with the service.  They also offered to provide a similar “test kit” for me to giveaway, so make sure you read to the end of this post to find out how you can enter to win.

With FedEx Print & Go you can print from your iPhone^®, BlackBerry^® smartphone,  Android^TM phone, or USB flash drive. I tested the service with my iPhone 4 as well as the USB flash drive they sent me.

Their service allows you to print to any of their self-service machines. What can you print you ask?

• Accepted file types include Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe PDF documents. (Update – the service now also supports JPG, TIF, and other image formats)
• To print other formats, or for binding and other finishing options, you can see a FedEx Office employee at the store.

To begin using FedEx Office Print & Go from your iPhone, BlackBerry smartphone, or Android device you first have to download the HP ePrint app.

I jumped to the Apple App store and downloaded the HP ePrint app. This app lets you do more than print to the FedEx Print and Go service.  It also lets you print to other public print locations as well as to wireless HP printers that support AirPrint.

The app wanted to use my current location to find nearby public print locations so I clicked OK.  It then asked me to create an account with my email address. I receive an activation code via email and enter into the app and clicked activate to complete the registration process. Read more

Announcing the Winner of the Signed Copy of The New Small

I’d like to thank everyone that entered the contest to win a signed copy of Phil Simon’s book The New Small.  I asked you to share  your 2 “must-have” free or open-source tools that help you run your business in the comments section of the video interview I did with Phil. There were lots of good suggestions and hopefully you discovered some new tools to explore. I hope even though the contest is over you will continue to contribute your suggestions and essential tools.

Today I chose one comment at random and I’m please to announce that Russell Milland will be the proud owner of The New Small – congrats Russell!

If you didn’t win – you should definitely get yourself a copy of Phil’s book.  It is a hand in a glove with all the tools, strategies, and shifts we talk about here on The Anywhere Office.  And if you haven’t watched the interview yet – check it out.  Phil and I had some great discussions.

BTW – In looking for a way to pick a random comment as a winner I used one of the 5 enablers Phil mentions in the New Small – Free and Open Source software!  I went to the iPhone App store and found Random NumGenerator – a great free app that let me put in the number of comments and then with one tap choose a random number.  Gotta love it!

 

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