Category: Lifestyle

People who work in offices tend to imagine that working from home is one long, cosy day in pyjamas with a cat on your lap. Some days it is. Most days, if you're not careful, it's a slow drift towards talking to the kettle and realising at 4pm that you haven't been outside, spoken to a human or eaten anything that wasn't toast.

I've been freelancing from home in London for nearly five years now, in a series of rented flats of steadily decreasing size. Here's what's helped me stay productive and, more importantly, sane.

So this is the bit where I'm supposed to introduce myself, and I have to admit that after three and a bit years of writing other people's "About Us" pages, writing my own is surprisingly hard. It turns out it's much easier to make a luxury handbag sound fascinating than it is to make yourself sound vaguely interesting without coming across as smug. Bear with me.

I'm Abi. I live in London, I write for a living, and I've been doing it on a freelance basis since 2012. Most of what I do is copywriting - web pages, product descriptions, catalogue copy, blog posts that go out under someone else's name - plus a decent amount of editing and proofreading. I also write regularly for a couple of online arts, culture and lifestyle magazines, which is the part of the job that lets me go to things and then have opinions about them in public.