Behind The Scenes Snapshots With HP & Intel

I'm often asked what's involved in working as a stylist and how I manage my schedule with two small children and the blog. Well...much of the time it's a game of spinning plates and sometimes I drop the ball (wait-that's a different analogy) and have to admit defeat - sometimes cleaning up smoothie or plant soil off the carpet trumps planning for my latest project!

I know some of you are really keen to see more behind the scenes type posts which I'm working towards gradually, but today I thought I'd take you with me on an exciting project I'm working on for September. I'll tell you more about it when I know it's safe to but for the moment I'll have to leave you guessing...however I will tell you that it involves our home. I've been working hard on getting some of the other rooms in the house finished in time for this which has been both exciting and terrifying, particularly the past week when I've been trying to balance entertaining my two over Easter and feeling the pressure of this deadline. Unless I'm assisting on location or have a focused day of work booked in with Rob who also works from home, I have to try to fit things in around the day to day stuff - morning naps, nursery pick-ups and running errands. In the evenings after the rotters have gone to bed I'll spend three hours or so emailing and blogging. Phew! Not exactly an ideal situation and despite having my phone to keep me in touch with things when I'm away from my desk, I'm still waiting to come home to the safety of guaranteed wireless before I catch up with myself. So, I teamed up with HP & Intel to see if I could better streamline my workload and find my happy work place outside the sanctuary of my beautiful little office to get stuff done. And how I love my office...

Having flexibility on the move is absolutely key for me, that's what's so clever about the HP Stream 7, a new kind of tablet with Intel Inside®. No longer tied to my laptop and stuck at home, this baby allows me to access email, my social media, set up an invoice and source props for a shoot at any time throughout the day. Since the Stream runs on Windows 8, a lot of the applications ask you to sign in with a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one (as I didn't) then it doesn't matter-it takes a few minutes to set up. Tip: You can use any existing email address to create a Microsoft account although the default option will encourage you to set up a new one (Hotmail, for example). Once signed in with this, I could easily add my cloud-based email account to the Mail application in Windows and customise the desktop with the apps I needed.

The 7" notebook is compact enough to carry around with the rest of your essentials but has a substantial enough screen to work on too - saves me from squinting over my phone. I'm your habitual paper and pencil type when it comes to keeping all my notes (often ending up scrunched up at the bottom of a bag) so when inspiration strikes I can open up OneNote and store my ideas and lists in one place-it also has the ability to voice record which saves me time if I don't have any hands free for typing. The super fast Intel Inside® processor puts my laptop to shame with fast loading speed too, so I can access all of my documents quickly from any device via cloud storage (which includes up to 1TB for a year). I've had to do a lot of last minute chasing in the past week so it's been brilliant to have this to hand when I need to be quick and now I've got the ability to shift seamlessly from my laptop and continue to work wherever I am with a wifi point. This weekend I escaped the kids for a quick trip to IKEA to research and make a few unnecessary purchases. And no. I absolutely did not buy any more plants. Really...

Let's not be forgetting that aside from all the desk based work of which there is plenty, there's a small percentage of creativity involved in the job too. Honest. I often find the best inspiration when I'm least expecting it, so being able to take snap shots on a larger screen to save for later is ideal - I took a couple of shots of the moodboard I've been working on with it to take with me as a reference which made life easier choosing what I needed.

All in all I'm pretty darn impressed with the HP Stream even though it's a new system for me. Thanks to HP & Intel for taking me out of my desktop bubble and making it work for me, wherever I am. Can't wait to share more of my news with you in the coming weeks!

This post is in collaboration with HP & Intel as part of their #WorkHappy campaign. Check out the hashtag and find your happy work place. 

Thank you to my sister Megan for taking over the camera on our propping trip!