Advertise on podcast: Yes, I Work From Home

Anaïs Comot is owner of HerCode Podcast and HerCommunity. In this episode, she tells her story about how she is originally from France and the corporate journey that led her to London where she is now a career strategist who helps women build a career they're truly happy with. Coming from a procurement and consultancy background, she has made multiple career transitions herself and experienced the struggles associated with a career that is not fulfilling, even impacting her own health and other aspects of her life. She has found connection with other expats who are living and/or working abroad and the unique set of challenges that comes with that. Ultimately, she is enjoying the freedom she can have to travel back home with the option to work from a traveling home office while visiting friends and family on occasion. Anaïs has worked with 200+ professionals from various backgrounds and industries, generally meeting with her clients in 1-on-1 online coaching sessions, but she also offers group coaching and runs HerCommunity virtually as a free space that includes weekly resources available to anyone looking to make the most out of their careers. She strongly believes that life is too short to fill unfulfilled at work and actively supports her community through various channels, including the HerCode podcast in addition to HerCommunity. Anaïs can be found in the following places: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaiscomot/ Website: https://www.hercode.co.uk/

Joe Gallant is from Kent, England, and he is the owner of Be Gallant where he designs websites and other content and helps create visual identities for small startup businesses and charities. His passion is helping people and organizations to find their voice online, through effective branding and quality content. In this episode, Joe tells his experience of how he has worked for a variety of small companies and also churches and how his family recently made a move from a coastal location back to closer to home now that he has a wife and young daughter and dog and what it was like to build a home office that was more intentional this time around. Joe is officially leaving some of his former part-time and in-person work in order to dedicate his attention to his remote business at this time. Joe recommends finding ways to make a workspace enjoyable to be in and personally finds that starting his day with prayer and meditation sets his day on the right path. Joe believes if someone can find what works for them in terms of a routine, they can discover more productive times of day but don’t sweat it if it doesn’t always go to plan. You can find out more about Joe and his work at begallant.uk Instagram: Jgchurchcomms 

Kelly McGinley, from Mechanicsburg, PA, is the principal consultant and owner of her company Function & Flow where she serves as a productivity specialist who loves to explore different tools and tactics for time and task management. She comes from a background of working in a remote job where she was working long hours and felt overloaded and working all the time and has transitioned to her new role where she has much more autonomy over how and when she works which has shifted her balance so that it feels so much closer to the perfect fit. In this episode, Kelly discusses how she organizes her work day and how she has had to combat letting her work bleed into the rest of her life life, especially when she didn't plan her downtime. She has put defaults in place so she can do a better job of enjoying life outside of work as well. She and her spouse have both been working from home, and she tells the story about how she's accidentally trapped her husband on one end of the house while conducting meetings in a shared space. Kelly offers productivity coaching for people and project managers and has actually just published her book Start With Better Meetings, a tool for managers of any kind of team, but especially practical for those leading remote and hybrid teams with an aim to help foster more effective meetings and ultimately restore about 2-3 hours of usable time to a given work week while still making steady progress toward goals and deliverables. She often meets with small teams remotely to work on meeting management and also offers group and individual sessions on calendar and time management help as well as assistance with task prioritization and teaches reflection. Her Procrastination to Action Package focuses primarily on identifying "procrastination preference," roadblocks, distractions, key goals, and a path to consistently make progress toward those goals. She comes with a rich history of working with nonprofits and other organizations including connecting classrooms to communities, designing productivity strategies for corporations and non-profits, and turning a maximum-security cell block into an award-winning, tail-wagging incubator for compassionate change at the HOPE Dogs Program. Kelly has spent the last 25 years designing and building programs, partnerships, and place-based projects and is a professional member of the National Association of Productivity and Organization Professionals (NAPO) where she serves on the Education Advisory Committee. Ever on the hunt for the best remote-work tools, Kelly has decided that ClickUp is her favorite app for managing multi-stage projects and loves how she can map a project any way she likes and then have reminders automatically integrate with her Google calendar.

Steve Mellor is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA and he is owner and executive coach of Career Competitor LLC for 2 Years. His "first & final 30" advice is his key to every day where, in order to maximize productivity and mental health, he focuses on how he uses the first and final 30 minutes of his day in order to make the most of his time. In this episode, Steve shares how he feels that having commitments that intentionally pull you away from your desk throughout the week are vital for social reasons and to provide some variety for certain tasks. As an executive coach, Steves's motto is "pursue your optimal self," and he likes to bring everything back to clients who work from home to the importance of serving the optimal self. He works with clients currently on ensuring they are focused on their optimal selves so they can build a workday and lifestyle that embodies their growth of it. To this end, Steve wrote a book called "SHOCK THE WORLD! A Competitor's Guide to Realizing Your Potential" which could certainly be a powerful resource to anyone looking to better lead their work-from-home lifestyle. Steve actually has almost 2 decades of experience working with elite performers within high-performance environments as an olympic swim coach, and he talks about how Covid-19 helped push him into coaching for business execs and more. Whether in his role as an executive coach, culture consultant, speaker, or author, Steve’s work targets bringing the best out of individuals, while ensuring teams and organizations are optimized through the process. This native of England, former top-50 world-ranked swimmer, husband, father, and lifelong competitor is driven to pursue his optimal self by working with those that are eager to do the same.

Jill Wright is is an author, podcaster, and coach at Grow Like a Mother based out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She has two gigs and is currently commuting into the city for her corporate job while building up her coaching business with an eye toward perhaps eventually transitioning out of her 9-5 to focus solely on her own business. In this episode, Jill shares some time management and productivity tips for working mothers, including those who juggle things as work-from-home mamas. Jill shares some tips that might be of use, especially to single moms and those with shared custody, and gives some of her own advice about how she has managed her time around her family's unique schedule which, for her, sometimes means that her down time and a chance to decompress happens on her commute to her day job so that she has more time for focus on her coaching business and clients when she's working from home. Jill has dedicated the last 4 years to personal development as she grew her business and taught others how to achieve alignment and balance in all of their roles through a variety of techniques. She does have free workshops, digital courses, and offers 1:1 and group coaching, and is willing to share her free 5-day video series. She is an entrepreneur-turned-life coach focused on helping moms achieve alignment with themselves and balance in all areas of their lives.

Jessica Rhys-Griffith, from Shropshire, UK, is a work/life coach for female "mum" executives who are feeling not quite good enough. She helps her clients get to a place where they feel, calm, and confidently in control of their lives as the role model they want to be for their children and the leader they want to be in their professional life. In this episode, Jessica shares insight on her own journey coming from a corporate world where she was considered a key player in senior management to working from home for the same organization (1 day a week was adjusted to 5 days a week starting in 2020), and then the more recent transition to working for herself. She shares some of her personal experiences as she's made the shift and how she can now turn around and help others, including remote executives, in making their day-to-day better. She comes from the perspective of being someone who has had to juggle the challenges of building a supportive and positive home environment for herself and her child while handling the increasing demands and expectations of an executive role in what has become an increasingly volatile world. At the beginning of her remote-work life, Jessica experienced some discomfort with the changes and experienced some of the ups and downs but has worked to minimize the negative aspects and enjoy a more balanced life. Jessica now runs JRG Coaching, Ltd, and her coaching is centered around health and positivity, time management, and manageable to-do lists. She offers tips for connecting with children and different ways to keep them motivated in the home environment. Jessica enjoys being able to walk her child home from school in the afternoons and has just planned for that as part of her daily routine. Some of her strategies also include heading to a local coffee shop for a change of scenery and ensuring she has meetings scheduled to help with motivation and keeping engaged. She speaks about adjusting her mindset and being present for family and changes she made to herself as a leader to ensure that she keeps positive and energized. When she made key decisions around being clear on what kind of life she wanted for herself and her daughter, by setting boundaries, asking the right people for help, and changing aspects of how I worked, she found a way to enjoy home and work and even find time for herself! Jessica has always been motivated by working with individuals and teams to achieve their best and wants to take what she's learned to support others in similar situations to find their way to be their best selves and be successful at home and work. She does offer a 30-minute free consultation (with no obligation) to do a work/life balance audit and provides some practical tips that people can start to implement.

Shane Spraggs left his role in the office at the start of the pandemic and joined Virtira, a Canadian company that helps organizations work without boundaries by optimizing their remote teams and processes. Virtira had been working remotely since 2007. It was interesting for him to learn their best practices while remote work was evolving as a result of the pandemic. He is now the CEO of Virtira. He lives in PST a few hours from Vancouver, but most of his team is out East, and the company serves teams in the USA as well. In this episode, Shane talks about his experiences working remotely as a CEO. He is passionate about remote management, strategic planning, and culture. They have a "no meeting Friday" policy at their company that is followed, for the most part. If someone can book at least a week in advance, they'll be guaranteed to be able to pick any time of day. He feels that at this point in his career and his role, he has a pretty good handle on being able to moderate his work with everything else and enjoys how he has the flexibility to go for a morning hike with friends every morning and can fit in the occasional urgent project. He shares some of his remote-work advice: "Don't eat at your desk - it's far too easy to overeat, plus you miss an opportunity to take a break." He's also a fan actually using his sit-stand desk. Shane has been driving successful projects for a variety of notable media and software start-ups for 25 years. Shane recently co-authored a book with Cynthia Watson, The Power of Remote, which just launched on February 7, 2023. Virtira's website offers a remote readiness assessment that reviews an organization's fitness for remote work.

Janet McKenna Lowry is a small business owner running Massachusetts Tax School for Practitioners out of Greenfield, Massachusetts. Janet says that she is not a tax expert and never was particularly confident in her math skills, but she's learned that preparing taxes is more about organization, and there's very little math involved. There's a huge demand for the work despite more and more people having access to the software to do it themselves, droves of people would still rather pay for help. It's a great field for anyone who needs flexibility (moms, artists, people who want to travel so many months out of the year, gig workers who have a slow season, etc). Janet and her business partner had been running their course onsite at a local university but moved everything to an online format with the blessing of the IRS during the pandemic, and they've decided to keep it online as it offers more flexibility to the attendees. She's now wearing multiple hats as CFO, webmaster, marketing, registrar, and operations. This tax school partners with tax experts who teach the courses to meet the 72 hours of continuing education hours tax preparers are required to complete every 3 years. In this episode, Janet shares how the topic of tax preparation has become an especially exciting one, because she's helping get people access to flexible work in a way she wishes she had earlier in her life, like when she had younger children. There's actually an extreme deficit of tax preparers as many of the people in the field are entering their retirement years, so if people want flexible work or to just work 3-4 months out of the year, this is a great field to look at (and it can be lucrative too, especially for those who go on their own and/or take the extra steps to do business taxes and trusts and estates). Some big name tax preparation sites do require their employees to have a degree, but it's actually something that is available to people with or without high school diplomas or college degrees as the methods can be learned just by working alongside someone in the field and learning online, keeping up with the continuing education hours. Some people do go into accounting to have more consistent work throughout the year, but it's not necessary. Janet has actually been living the dream working from home on and off in different capacities for about 10 years, and currently she has gotten it to where she has a busy season where she's working 40 hours a week for a few months while they're putting on their course and then it relaxes down to about 25 hours a week for the rest of the year where she focuses coaching and consulting around being a better boss, skills like learning boundaries and negotiation skills as an employee. She went back to school at age 50 and earned her MBA from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Justin James owns Let Your Nerd Be Heard where he operates as a virtual event producer out of a home office in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Justin offers oversight and technical support to make virtual events run smoothly for his clients, who are often entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, course creators, and coaches. Justin is brilliant with making Zoom look good and work well for his clients with all the bells and whistles. He helps with transitions and monitors the chat and managing any technical support issues that come up for guests so that the presenters can simply do the talking and still look and sound professional. In this episode, Justin talks about his work-from-home journey. He's worked from home for 9 of the last 23 years, first for 4 years, was back in the office for awhile, and then now fully remote again for the past 5 years. He currently has a three-monitor desk for his long-term day job work as a software developer and another with more like 9 monitors in the same office for his other production projects. He has a red and green busy light outside the office that functions as an "on-air" light, so that his family knows when they can enter the office and when to knock to ask to enter. Justin also offers event mentoring services. He has ranked 4 times as an Amazon International Best Selling Author and currently has an upcoming project, a course called The Tech Made E.A.S.Y. Solution: How to Keep Your Focus on Your Content, Offer, and Coaching, Not On Complicated Tech which can be found soon on his Let Your Nerd Be Heard website.

Todd Paulsmeyer is a former software developer and consultant who has turned to product development of some innovative baby nail clippers he’s selling on Amazon. He works from a home office and his garage workshop in Denver Colorado but is looking at expanding to outsourcing more of the manufacturing process once his production really takes off. He is building on his problem solving strategy from his previous line of work and applying the concept of working with experts for business strategy and leaning on the expertise of some coaches as he embarks on this new project. Paul has worked from home longer than a lot of people, with more than 3 decades working as a software developer, more or less logging on from a home office since 2003 when the internet was still just gaining popularity in private homes. For 28, years he was working as an independent consultant, working for large and small projects for big clients such as IBM, The State of Utah, The State of Alaska, General Motors, and the New York Transit Authority. He was managing and running his own software business for time tracking that tens of thousands of work-at-home consultants were using but, ultimately, went into consulting and is now dedicated to bringing the safest nail clippers in the world to help parents trim the nails of their tiny infants without risk of causing injuries and pain. Todd's invention, LuvClip nail clippers, has been awarded seals of excellence by three organizations who recognize safe and effective products for parents to use on their children and are getting good reviews from parents of young children and other caregivers. He attributes the development of this product to working from home when his children were first born, especially being more involved with their care which made him realize the need for this type of product after carefully clipping his newborn’s nails and catching some skin. Working from home now, his time is split between preparing the LuvClip nail clippers for distribution versus the business development and marketing aspect of an entrepreneurial business selling physical products instead of services. With the change in workflow, Todd manages his time by exercising first thing in the morning to set the tone for the day and then utilizing Focusmate while he’s in the office to help minimize distractions.

Anna Burgess Yang is a former product manager turned freelance content marketer, journalist, and workflow consultant from Chicago. She is passionate about educating and equipping people to take control of their remote work lives and their careers. Anna has been working from home for 16 years now and currently works from home full-time, which for her is about 25 hours per week. She's worked in different settings in the past and appreciated the results oriented workflow and prioritizes working efficiently now to get a lot done in a short time rather than feeling a need to sit at her desk 40 hours a week. In the past, she was at one time the only remote employee, then she was with a company that transitioned to fully remote, and she's worked for a company with global remote employees. She's experienced different work flows and worked synchronously and asynchronously and even hired new remote employees. This all helped Anna build foundational knowledge about "what works and what doesn't work" for her. In this episode, Anna tells a few stories including one about a cat who likes to get into the ceiling and another about how she first started working from home which involved quitting her job to take a new job, with her boss letting her work from home to keep her with the company. Awhile back, she wrote a LinkedIn post about remote work and her husband quitting his job when his employer ordered him back into the office, and he decided to get a different job instead, one that allowed him to continue to work remotely as they both like to be able to share in the kid-related stuff that comes up during the day. They've noticed some differences in expectations from remote employers with some being more flexible (small companies) and others requiring people to be on camera and in meetings all day. Anna now works for herself and prefers to embrace flexibility which allows her to maintain a good balance, even when she goes to pick up her children in the middle of the day or go grocery shopping on a Friday morning. She doesn't think about working early or late as an inconvenience, because she knows she is taking control over her own life. In her work as a workflow consultant, Anna helps solopreneurs and small businesses automate workflow with tools like Zapier. She writes about working remotely in her Substack as well. Anna's goal is to educate others about remote work, the future of work, and how work can be better. She typically focuses on writing about fintech and product-led content. She's found many collaboration tools to make remote work easier now, including project management tools, video tools for asynchronous communication, etc, that didn't exist when she first started working from home.

Christine Reed is an author and freelancer who has traveled extensively around the states in three different vans as part of the vanlife movement, and she's looking forward to partnering soon with a company that builds out vans for people who intend to travel and live in them as opposed to RVs or other styles of tiny homes. She loves the rugged outdoors and long-distance backpacking and wrote her first book, a memoir titled Alone in Wonderland. In her book and in talks at events such as TinyFest, REI and other outdoorsy supply stores, Christine shares her personal journey from sedentary office worker/retail worker to a lifestyle of freedom and adventure. Christine likes to inspire people to see something bigger for themselves but is also quick to share about her own struggles with loneliness at times on the road or trail and how she's come to find ways of embracing some of that discomfort and connecting with her own self as well as with others. In this episode, Christine talks about what it's been like to be a self-published author on tour during a global pandemic and how that's affected the timeline of her book tour while also running a freelance business as a writer and social media manager. She does work from her home base in the Denver and sometimes Phoenix area, sometimes a few weeks or a month at a time. When she went from hiking extensively on the Appalachian and Wonderland Trail to staying somewhere different nearly every night while on tour, it was socially and physically exhausting for her as someone who tends toward the introverted side. She's learned to balance the amount of time she travels with the amount of time she can spend outdoors and working and resting. Her days are often spent at libraries and coffee shops for wifi, and she generally has signal and access to wifi as she generally stays close to metropolitan areas when she's working. Christine loves the freedom that her vanlife lifestyle has allowed, but she recommends that people who are considering it for the first time go ahead and rent a van first to see if it's something that they really want to invest in, most people know within the first 6 months if it's sustainable for them. Some of the tools and tips that Christine recommends for working remotely, and specifically while on the road to some extent, include keeping a structured calendar to avoid work creeping into free time and scheduling Zoom sessions with work-from-home and other vanlife friends for accountability and socialization. Her book was really a sort of a catalyst for her to get where she is now. It was the first move into a more alternative lifestyle, and she wouldn't be working remotely without it; but the book, at the same time, also helps give her the freedom to keep hiking every year. She intends to write her second book soon, so stay tuned!