4 Essential Pieces of Tech for Your Home Office

After thinking about it for a long time, you recently made the decision to work from home. You are SO excited to be a work at home mom (WAHM). It gives you a flexible schedule that allows you to be there for your kids while still bringing in money.

In order to make your home office-ready, you’ll need a certain amount of tech. While you already have a computer, you will want to invest in some additional technology to make you as productive as possible.

With this in mind, the following four pieces of technology will help to make your home office WAHM ready:

A Power Port That Can Handle Multiple Devices at Once

WAHMs typically use a number of devices, including your smartphone to stay in touch with both your clients and your kids and a tablet. In order to keep everything charged up at once, you may want to invest in a USB wall charger that can handle powering up multiple devices at the same time.

For example, the PowerPort 10 from Anker can charge up to 10 things at once and includes built-in power surge and temperature control. At around $40, it is a highly useful tech item that won’t break the bank, and it can handle a wide variety of devices.

A Home Office Desktop Hard Drive

As The Wire Cutter notes, you don’t need to invest in the sleekest and most elegant-looking spendy devices for your home office; instead, focus on finding reliable tools that are user-friendly and get the job done.

A great example of this is a desktop hard drive like the 4TB Western Digital My Book to handle storage and backup. Its 5 Gbps data transfer rate means you can copy files over quickly, and you can set it up to automatically backup your data on your schedule.

In addition to data related to your work, you can also use the hard drive to store scans of important family documents, as well as photos and music.

Add a Laser Printer to Your Home Office

If you already have an inkjet printer, you might feel like you are constantly running out to buy new ink cartridges. Now that you will be working from home and printing out invoices, project summaries, and other important documents, you will end up using more expensive ink than ever.

To save money in the long run, you might consider investing in a laser printer. While laser printers do tend to cost more than a basic inkjet model, the toner that the laser printer uses is cheaper in the long run because you can print out thousands of pages from one cartridge, as opposed to ink cartridges that run out much sooner.

Please don’t toss your existing inkjet printer though — it does very well printing out photos and will still be useful to you. But for work, if you plan on doing a lot of printing, the economical and high-volume laser model is the way to go.

Home Security Camera System

Now that you have your home office fully loaded with everything a busy WAHM needs, it’s time to make one more purchase and invest in a home security camera system. This way, you can protect your new equipment 24/7.

For instance, Lorex offers a number of security camera systems that can be installed both inside and out. You can place them near doors and windows as well as inside your home office, and cover objects that might attract the attention of a burglar.

Good Luck in Your New Role

You’ve got the discipline, desire and drive to be a successful WAHM. Now, with the help of some key technology including a hard drive, home monitoring system and laser printer, you will also have the tools that are necessary to get your new and flexible at-home career off the ground.