Quain's Top Ten ways to stake out a stable home office. A second line will prevent incoming calls from disrupting your Web cruising and emailing. Stake out an office with a door. You might get cozy sitting in the corner of your den, but you'll never get any work done. Spread your email address around and force people to send email rather than faxes.
Faxes result in additional costs for paper and more stuff to file.
But forget the hype about the paperless office and buy more filing cabinets than you think you'll need. You'll use it. Write down all your passwords. Security experts argue you should never do this, but a growing amount of software and Web sites require passwords. It's more likely that you'll forget a password than have someone steal your cheat sheet.