Great post! My ducks are in a row now. :)

When my wife and I went looking for furniture, we started at the office stores and looked at their stuff. She then said to me, “Mike, this is crap. Look at this particle board stuff. I mean, spill some water over this and everything will buckle up. It sure looks great on the surface, but take a look at the particle board from beneath the top. And yet they want to charge $1500 to $3000 for this stuff? No, let’s hit a regular furniture store, I have a better idea.” So off we went to a place called Room Store. When we were in there, we saw something in the Kathy Ireland collection. It was very modern and European in styling. She found a dinner buffet cabinet that was smallish but not too small. She then added a dining room table. The total cost was $1000. We saved on the delivery cost by driving a pickup truck to the warehouse the next morning, checking out the goods for damage, and then drove it off very carefully. It wasn’t very hard to set things up and I had an office “desk” and office “cabinet”. My wife then got some special business crates that you can put hanging files in. I raised my office chair up a little, which is okay because actually I’m 6′4″ and that works for me. In the end, it was a fantastic deal and was much better in wood quality and finish than the overpriced office stuff. Now some may say, yeah, but where are the drawers in your desk? I don’t have any, and I don’t need any. I keep all lose papers in a single file on my table. That’s my latest projects file. And then I have a paper notepad and a mechanical pencil (so that I don’t need to sharpen all the time). Anything else goes either in my storage office/naproom or in my business cabinet that is actually a dinner buffet cabinet. And everything else than that is usually kept inside my laptop and on a USB thumb drive.

I also highly recommend you get a high-powered yet small laptop instead of a desktop PC, and then attach a screen with it and set it up in dual screen mode (so you can drag windows back and forth). With this arrangement you can get work done on your large screen, side stuff on your small screen, and when you’re wife says you need to work from the beach house for a week, you simply take your laptop and go without having to move any files. And when you’re sick, you just take the laptop and a lapboard and head into the “nap room” to work.

-Phil

Hard copies of receipts and reports are pretty essential. While it drives me nuts to have so much ’stuff’ lying around, if you keep it organized from the start, it will be much easier for you when April 15th rolls around.

how to tell my girlfriend “go away”… :) any sugestions?

This is so true! For me at least…. The computer itself… is a distracting tool… I mean we work on a machine… that entertains us… so from time to time… I get distracted…. and I start loading up some DVD’s to watch… etc… I also have a TV tuner card…. so yeah… thats bad too. But… when I finally concentrate and start working… I keep going. Maybe I need to reformat this machine… and install 2 different boot setups… One with Windows Vista… which will be plain and nothing… so I won’t distract myself, with games, etc! And the other boot… with Windows xp, with everything on it.

Till then,

Jean