PR Girl Must-Haves: Work from Home

PR girls come in all shapes, sizes and varieties. Some work for big name PR firms and attend all NYFW events and glamours parties. Others work for boutique firms at night because they work another job all day that affords them the chance to do work they’re passionate about without worrying about how to pay the bills.

I’m the latter type of PR girl. I primarily work from home in the evening, or the coffee shop down the street or the library. On any given Sunday, you can find me working on my trusty Macbook with my cup of tea and my headphones, hidden in the stacks at the main branch of the Carnegie Library here in Pittsburgh. Since I work from home, I know the importance of having the right tools to be successful. These are my essentials for successfully working from home.

A Good Space

This is the most important thing for me. I need to have a place where I can focus on the tasks at hand. Since a lot of my work is on the creative end, I also need a space that makes me feel inspired and creative. I primarily work at a desk that I bought used and refurbished. My desk has lots of shelves to hold the things I use most, a dry erase board for a back for all my notes,  drawers and cabinets to hide the things I just don’t have time to deal with (because it happens), and it’s just cute enough to get my creative juices flowing. I also keep a wax warmer with a few of my favorite scents and an inspiration board I made hanging on the wall.

When I just need to get out of the house, I walk down to the local coffee shop or take a drive to the library. The important thing isn’t to spend a ton of money creating a beautiful office space, but to find a corner of the world that you’re both comfortable and productive in.

The Right Tools

Having the right tools is important to any job, but if you’re working from home, no one is going to offer you access to things you might need like a company with an office might. Make sure you have the things you, personally, need to work effectively and efficiently each day. Whether that’s a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite, a subscription to Cision or another software you need, a working computer, reliable phone and internet, you have to make sure that you have it or your work will suffer. Count it as a business expense and file it with your taxes.

A Schedule

Remote work is fantastic because you can work whenever, wherever. Remote work also sometimes sucks because you can work whenever, wherever. Create a schedule that works for you and for your work and do your best to stick to it. I choose to do PR work in the evening during the week and in the late morning and into the afternoon on the weekends. Early in the morning and late at night, I work on my blog and any writing I need to do. That’s just when I work best on each of those tasks. The old adage “Leave work at work” is just as important today as it was in the past. Even if you work from home, you need to worry about work during work time and leave it behind when time is up.

A Method to Keep Your Things Organized

Sometimes it’s difficult to be organized at home because home is a place of comfort and relaxation. When you work from home, you need a little corner where you can keep all of your work items and a place that reflects the way you work. I chose a notebook/planner combination to keep all of my work papers, notes and things in. I like it because it easily goes wherever I go without me losing my things, it has a giant calendar, folders and a ton of pages for notes. (This is the notebook I picked.)