Home Office

As part of the life laundry sessions that we have been doing at home, we plan to decorate our "relaxing" room. At the moment this room houses the desktop, a small desk and some files etc and is the only thing in there that isn't conducive to relaxation. Its hard to not notice the whir of the fans in the PC when snuggled up in front of the fire watching a movie.

So plans are afoot to move the office space to our family room, where the kids (who are now at any age to use the internet) can also utilise the space. I found this post about setting up a good home office on the trawl this morning and it has some good tips.

The uber plan is to re-develop the building at the bottom of our garden to have an office space (or get an eriba caravan). That would give us more room, the one thing that we are lacking with a "in-house" solution. Of course we are always on the look out for our ideal house to move to - but funds are restricting that idea! We could get power into the building and kit it out so it could join the wireless network.

We are currently looking at furniture items for the family room that would allow us to have the PC enclosed when its not in use, its quite restrictive, because we have a defined area for the furniture to fit into and the desktop machine that we currently run (the dream to replace that with an iMac) is quite an large case (and doesn't fit into some of the computer units we've looked at).

Would appreciate any links you have for computer storage solutions.

[Design tips for a productive home office via Lifehack]

How did the budget affect me?

I managed to get a paper on the way to work this morning and try and diagnose how it might affect me. Obviously pretty much all of it will affect me at some point, but the short term gains and loses were what I was interested in.

There is a planned decrease in income tax, to the lowest for 75 years, but this is almost exactly offset by other changes in National insurance contributions and the abolition of the 10% bracket - so not much either way there.

The ISA limit has been increased to £7,200 - not a significant rise so no major benefits to be had there either

Car Tax (oh dear) - I was dreading this, but it would seem that at first glance at the CO2 figures of our car, we just scrape under being a group D, and the big hike in prices only applies to that group, so I might have avoided the increase to £400 in 2008!

The biggest hit for me is corporation tax on small businesses is rising by 3%, which is going to be around my neck until I'm making £150k profit a year

We will get some benefits from a rise in child allowance. With a big emphasis on being green (which we try our hardest to do at home) the "waste tax" is interesting. Out bin at home hardly gets full at the end of the week, so hopefully any weighed waste tax would bot be too hard on us.

Start-up business

In June 2006 I left a staff position at a well known company to go freelance. Why did I take that decision?

I had, since I left university in 1994, worked in industrial automation for a number of companies both small and large. I had had the opportunity to travel extensively around the UK and occasionally globally. In 2000 I got the opportunity to work for Siemens - the market leader in Europe, in their newly formed integration dept.

Over the next 5 years I worked with some great people, many of who will be friends for life and I was exposed to many things that folks working at smaller companies never get the chance to do. So why give all this up?

One thing about larger companies is that they can be very cold. What I mean by that is that when decisions are made at a business level, the people making those decisions don't know the people that they will affect. We had some good, approachable local management who had the unfortunate job of telling us all that our division was downsizing to concentrate on a single industry sector.

Another company were interested in the purchase of the engineers and their skills, but I saw this as a potential step to the side or even backwards. If my hand was going to be forced, then I would make my own future.

After talking things through with the family (it is very important to get the buy in of the people you are going to affect), we decided that it seemed like a good time to break away.

Luckily I secured a position quickly and I signed up with a managed company, who would look after all my finances. I saw this as a quick start method of ensuring I maintained cash flow, but this wasn't going to be forever - I wanted my own business.

My initial thoughts were that I'd wait 12-18 months and then look into starting a Ltd company and gradually switching over, but a number of colleagues that I'd worked with at Siemens, also made the move to freelancing and went straight into the Ltd company route.

I registered my company in November 2006, and began making plans to switch all my contracts over to it before Christmas. It looks like I made the right move, because shortly after that the government stated their intentions for the future of managed service companies - and it didn't look all that great.

I'm now fully up and running and in full control of the operation. The accountancy I went with are fantastic and offered some great advice.

If I knew it was going to be this liberating I would have gone this route right at the start of the exercise, but as a newbie I just needed to get up and running. My advice to you if youy are thinking of starting up (especially in light of the plans for MSC) is to go Ltd. It might take a little longer to set up, registering with all the necessary bodies, but once thats out of the way its the better solution.

Have you got any stories about setup? Are there things I should be wary of in the next 12 months?

Birth

So what is this project all about? Well over the last 18 months I've been exposed to a great deal of change, creativity and inspiration. Along with my good friend Mark we embarked on the GTD journey, which to a degree I've embraced and use on a daily basis. As soon as you start digging into this area, the host of information, tips, hacks and other systems is overwhelming though. Within Google Reader I was exposed to a huge amount of people & inspiration. At the forefront of this was Merlin Mann and his 43Folders site. I started subscribing to more feeds and listening to more podcasts and soon came to realise that the whole GTD thing is completely adaptable, depending on what you need from it, what tools and time you have available and the type of things that you process.

The big change for me came 6 months ago when the company that I worked for closed our division. I jumped before I was pushed and went freelance - I was lucky to find work immediately. In the time since then I have started my own company and tried to come to grips with all the finances that come attached to that.

It was at this point that I realised that my system, personal finance & everyday tools I use was just a mess, so this year, 2007, is my year of change. I'm going to arrive at my GTD system, I'm going to settle into running my company, I'm going to make the switch from PC to mac and I'm going to be more creative.

I'm starting a few creative projects this year, and documenting my strive for the uber mac life will be one of them.