In a recent blog about Balancing Work and Home Life When Working From Home, we discussed the need to be very careful to avoid distractions – such as household chores and television – when chosing to have a home office instead of an office space Toronto at a business centre. We also stressed the importance of taking regular scheduled breaks or even procrastination times. One of the suggestions we made was to try to schedule in a five or ten-minute break once every two hours by taking a walk outside of the home.

In that same blog we made the suggestion about breaks and that another thing to use your break time was to check in on Facebook or or Twitter. We further suggested that you set a timer to let yourself know when your break is over. We suggested the timer so that you do not get allow the internet to become the distraction that you did not want it to be. The reason to bring this up is that recently, one of the people who does some of our blogs about our office for rent Toronto told us that because he uses social media for work, he is now less inclined to use social media for personal reasons when taking a break from working at home. He chose to take walks instead of tweeting or updating his Facebook page when he required a break from work.

While on a recent walk, the blogger was listening to the radio. He stopped and sat down on a park bench to check his emails on his phone. A few minutes after he sat down, a woman who was walking her dog joined him on the bench. She asked him which of the dogs in the dog park was his. He was confused until he realized that the bench he had sat down on was right next to the dog park. He then explained that he had just sat down and that he did not have a dog with him. Even after telling her that he did not have a dog in the park, she continued to talk to him and ask if he was from the area. He replied that he lived a few blocks away. Making small talk, she mentioned to him what a great place the dog park could be for business networking. She then said that she got that idea because of a blog a entry she stumbled on called The Smoking Area as a Networking Place Around Office Buildings? and proceeded to pull it up on her iPad. Our blogger started looking around as if to think he was being “punked” or was on some Candid-Camera-like show because she was rambling on about his blog entry. They talked for a few more minutes and parted ways without him telling her that he was author of that very blog!

Based on this story, we have asked Ian to write another blog entry in the future about business networking in places like the “dog park” and other places that people network either accidentally or intentionally that is outside a business setting such as an office space.

P.S.  Suzette (and your dog Bruce), watch for more of Ian’s blog entries on our site about those places where you do not expect to network.

P.P.S  Ian, why did you not ask why someone would decide to name their dog Bruce?