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After a crazy week on the road, the sound of “working from home on Friday” is amazing. Then, the craziness of the day starts and that laid back workday seems like a distant dream. Adding a few little touches to your home office can make all the difference. Here are 6 must-haves.

Just say the words “expenses” and “time reports” and anyone working in consulting longer than one pay period will cringe! It’s a painful administrative chore that no one can entirely escape. You may be lucky enough to have a single client or project for a while. But, let’s be honest – before long, you’re billing to your client, helping a partner with a proposal on the side, spending time planning your next office meeting and traveling to boot. At the end of the pay period you’re racing against the clock, trying to remember everything you did for the last two weeks, scrounging around your bag for receipts, and getting frustrated with all those pesky reminders popping up in Outlook to remind you you’re late for meeting. Here’s how to quickly organize your activities to save you time, cut out frustration, and make sure you get paid on time.

We all know one of the perks of traveling for work is the daily per diem. If your company policy requires you to charge in itemized expenses, you come out slightly ahead, even if you do nothing, because it is someone else’s money you are spending to eat – something you’d be doing regardless of whether you were out of town. If your company policy is simply to reimburse a flat amount per day rather than itemized meals, there is a lot more room to maximize this reimbursement. For the fortunate ones that find themselves in this situation, there are several things you can do to decrease your expenses, translating quickly into added money in your pocket each month (tax free in most cases).

Regardless of your area of expertise, if you are a consultant, you’ll likely find yourself regularly leading a meeting remotely, working in temporary space, pitching your services or skills to get staffed or sell work, traveling, and throwing a deliverable together in a crunch. Being well-prepared with a robust toolkit at your disposal will help you tackle each of these with ease over and over again. Here are 20 items to include that are sure to make a big difference in your work and your life.

Lately I seem to find myself being inundated with emails. As a society, we’ve become completely and utterly over dependent on it for everything we do in our work lives! Now, I’m not claiming perfection – I certainly have my moments too. But, every once in a while I think it’s a good reminder to look at how we use email and what things we might be doing that leave us wondering why no one takes action or pays attention to it. So here are 4 mistakes worth avoiding.

For anyone, new or seasoned, being asked to do something you’ve never done before can instantly launch you way outside of your comfort zone and cause some intense reactions! There is, of course, the fear of not doing the best job possible, the frustration of things taking much longer than they should, but worse yet, the feeling that maybe someone might “call your bluff” so to speak. During a time of crisis like this, look at the resources you have available. The savvy consultant can tap into their very own hard drive.

Recently, I purchased a new laptop. While in the process of consolidating all my files into one place, my trusty “back-up” external hard drive ceased to work. Can you believe it?! As a consultant, my data was the single most important thing I relied on – it meant a jump-start on a presentation for a tight deadline, an idea box when I was stumped, and a virtual history of the contributions I made through my work. So what do you do when your back-up fails?