I have been working at home now for six whole weeks.  It’s strange sitting in an office on my own, in my own dining room, with the kitchen just a short walk away.

Although my working practices and the type of work I do have not changed there ha been a need to increase my communication with clients to support them through

these challenging times and ensure they are kept updated, not just with the normal work I do for them, but also the various initiatives which have been introduced by the government.

The biggest change I have noticed, however, is that now I have a mostly paperless office. I have not attempted to try to connect my work laptop to my home printer, as I’m sure it wouldn’t work – nothing I try ever does!  Therefore, I haven’t printed a single email, or any other work document since I left the office back in March.

Interestingly, I was always a bit anti the recent trend to become a completely paperless office – but as I am not currently connected to a printer it has kind of forced the issue.

It is easier to be paperless when you have two screens on which to view your documents. However, there are still times though when I want to press print just to have a piece of paper to scrawl all over or to ‘tick’ off figures.

The way in which we have needed to get paperwork from clients has also had to change. With our increased use of technology nowadays we depend so much on clients providing information electronically.  By embracing technology, even when they really don’t want to, many clients now photograph their receipts and send them to us by email.  Traditionally clients would tend to drop off a bag of paper receipts at the office, but when the office isn’t open, technology has really come into play.

My challenge has been to learn how to extract the photos from the email and resize them, which tends to involve cropping them and saving them as PDF documents and then sending them to a ‘magical’ software to process them automatically.

In some ways I enjoy not having to travel to work or dress to look the part.  I also enjoy singing along to the radio as the day passes by, and I do have an assistant (aka my husband) who makes my lunch for me fresh each day.  This saves me the dreaded chore of making up packed lunches the night before.

However, I do miss the company of working in the office, talking to colleagues, meeting clients face to face, and having printing facilities and paper files! At this rate the number of extra IT skills we will have gained by the end of lockdown will be vast – I just hope the directors haven’t got rid of the printer in the meantime and attempt to make us go completely paperless!

Looking for the positives in such a challenging situation for the world, I think both our team and many of our clients will have moved their working practices to a much more cloud and paperless basis which is what needs to happen if we are to keep up with technology.