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And something about QR code too

Well I don't really live in fear and trepidation but today is one of my days to work down at our store-front office and Steve has threatened to reorganize his office while I'm away. That means I don't really know what I'm going to find when I get home and that's a worry.

At the moment he's really quite self-contained in his office ... although he has set up the computer that he wants to turn into a server out in the lounge room ... so I guess anything is possible. Actually he has set his office up quite well and just about everything is at his fingertips so, from a productivity point of view, it works very well but it has begun to get a little messy lately.

To overcome that problem he's bringing in a filing cabinet to swallow a lot of the papers and files he has laying around on most of the flat surfaces in the office. Steve tends to subscribe to the belief that a messy office will mess up his thought patterns and become a major distraction. While I'm not sure whether that's true or not I do know that when Steve can work without being distracted his output is incredible.

So what does your work space look like? In fact, do you really have a work space you can call your own?

Because of what we do and where we do it a lot of Webmasters seem to think that they can work from the dining room table ... or from the couch with a laptop balanced on their knees but that is a major mistake. Even in the smallest place we've ever lived in we've always had an area set aside for work.

In the early days that was simply a computer desk tucked away in one corner of the lounge area but as our business grew we moved from that into a room that was solely set aside for our work and today we have two rooms in our house set aside as office space.

With dedicated space for our work we have never had to pack up what we've been doing to make room for other family activities and that has certainly been a huge boost to our productivity and once we were able to take over an entire room things got even better.

Not only can we go on working if family members come to stay - one of us is always able to get on with business while the other is entertaining the visitors - but at the end of the day we can always close the door on our offices and psychologically shut ourselves off from work and relax.

So if you're stuck working on the dining room table, or you're one of those who thinks that it's cool to work from the couch, then it's time to take your business up to the next level and get serious about increasing your productivity. If there isn't a room where you're living that you can take over and turn into an office then perhaps there's a quite corner somewhere in your house or apartment where you can set up a desk that you can use just for business.

Perhaps you'll find, like Steve, that your own work space can lead to being able to produce a lot more work each day. And then you too can face the added challenge of keeping it tidy.

QR code
Over the weekend I was reading an interesting piece about some not-so-new technology that looks to be about ready to hit critical mass outside of the country where it was developed. It's called QR code and it was first developed in Japan around 2002 and began to grow over there in 2003.

To best explain QR code let me suggest that you should think in terms of a bar code that can be read by the cameras in cell phones. But this 'bar code' doesn't tell you a price; this 'bar code' links your phone to a website where you can obtain more information about the place you saw displaying the code.

In Japan QR code often appears in shop windows and shop signs or on billboards or anywhere else that people passing by might see advertising. It's not bigger than the bar code you might see on a product in a shop but it has the potential to be far more powerful than any bar code you've ever seen.

As I said, QR code was developed in Japan where it has really spread and today a lot of people in Japan point their camera phones at the code right across the country. Now it's been launched in the United Kingdom and there's a lot of interest being shown in QR code in the United States.

Think about it for a moment and there are some exciting possibilities for marketers in both mainstream and adult. If you want to know more about it just do a search on Google and you'll even find a QR code generator.