Welcome to the third of the weekly interview series where I will speak a wide range of people who have embraced the work from home opportunity. We will speak to entrepreneurs, business owners, large organisation workers and freelancers about their trials and tribulations from working remotely.

Our third interviewee is Chris Spooner. If you are a graphics/web designer and haven’t heard of Chris then you have obviously lived under a rock for the past 4-5 years. Chris has become extremely popular due to his excellent tutorials through his fantastic Spoon graphics website before venturing into Line 25. Furthermore he now runs his a hugely successful gaming channel on Youtube. All in a days work for Chris.

What inspires me about Chris is not only his skills within design but his grasp of social media and site promotion. Chris gets it. This has been evident through his ability to leverage his Spoon graphics followers into other website ventures. It would be hard not to call Chris an entrepreneur. I was delighted to be given the opportunity to catch up with Chris this past week and ask him some questions on his businesses, working from home and of course the all important work space.

Q: Hi Chris, tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from, where do you live now?

Q: What company do you work for and what is your role within the organisation?

Q: How do you deal with stereotypes from friends in regards to productivity when working from home?  i.e.: Sleep until midday, 2 hour lunch breaks etc.

I usually play along and fuel the fire when I joke about being in retirement or take an afternoon off to go out in the sunshine.

Q: What is the most challenging part about working remotely and how do you overcome this?

I tend to do the majority of my work from my home office, but I have the most trouble when away on holidays. Often there’s no Internet in the places we’re staying, so keeping on top of my Internet businesses becomes a little tricky. Thankfully my server setup is reliable enough for my sites to tick over when I’m not around.

Q: What are the main positives around working from home?

Q: Do you have a dedicated office space and what is the importance of having this?

Q: Any pictures of your office space?

Q: Do you have any productivity tools you use to keep yourself efficient which may help our readers?

In the past I’ve tried all kinds of productivity apps, but I always find myself just relying on a pen and paper to get things done.

Q: If you could give any advice to our readers before deciding whether remote working is for them then what would it be?

Q: Do you believe more organisations should allow those with web based roles to work remotely? If so..how come?

Absolutely. Often there’s no need to get people together in an office working environment. It seems many companies do this out of tradition, but employees could potentially be much happier and productive if they had the opportunity to work in their own environments. These days there’s plenty of communication methods available to keep track on what’s happening with a project, which are usually faster than a face-to-face meeting.