“How do you DO it?!” If I had a dime for every time I heard that, I would be able to quit my home business.

Just kidding.

Seriously, time management is a serious issue for work from home Moms. You want your home business to be a success, but you don’t want the rest of your responsibilities to fall by the wayside… especially your children, who are the reason you chose to work from home in the first place.

While you’re probably already doing some of the obvious things like taking advantage of naptimes and bedtime, I hope you find some additional ideas from the following time management tips to make things easier for you while working from home and caring for young children.

Time Management for your Home Business

Have a clear purpose when you go online

Whenever you go to your computer, have a definite purpose in mind. It helps to keep a notebook by your computer always with your goals and to-do lists in it, all in once place. This helps prevent you from aimlessly checking email or surfing the net and getting lost. Know what you need to accomplish, write it down, do it, and move on to the next activity.

Outsource as many tasks as you can afford Consider hiring a virtual assistant if you have a lot of administrative tasks. Or pay your kids to do things for you that are age appropriate. This can even be a tax deductible expense. Check with your accountant.

Analyze your activities

Think about the steps you engage yourself in with your business and see if those tasks are really paying off for you. A lot of work at home Moms do things like join safelists, traffic exchanges and other activities that most internet marketing experts agree are not the best use of your time. Ask people who are where you want to be in your business how they manage their time. Just because something is free doesn’t mean you should be spending time doing it.

The best $20 you can spend on your business

That may be the money you spend hiring a Mommy’s helper to come over and play with your children for several hours. It’s amazing what you can get done during that time. Plus, your kids usually get worn out from all the fun and take longer naps. Everybody wins!

Think Assembly Line

In other words, group similar activities together. Don’t check your email all day, check it two or 3 times a day (at most) and answer all the emails at the same time. When you want to make changes to your website, list them all and wait until you need to make several changes at once. When one child asks for a story gather them all around. Same thing for snacks. Run all your errands at once.

Utilize Technology

Get wireless internet and a laptop if at all possible. This can make a drastic improvement in your ability to work online around your children. You can sit on the front porch and work on your website while your kids play in the yard. Or you can drop them off at a friend’s house and head to Starbucks and get online!

Use autoresponders, mailing lists and other resources to automate your business. If you find yourself typing out answers to the same questions over and over again, add pages to your website or create an ecourse or downloadable report that addresses those topics and refer your customers or downline or whomever to those.

Household time management

Simplify meal preparation and shopping

That doesn’t mean you spend a lot of extra money on convenience foods that aren’t good for you. But do make simple meals that even your children can help you prepare. Use your crock pot. Collect recipes that require few ingredients and no elaborate preparation.

Have a good routine for making menus and shopping. In the long run, extra trips to the store for that missing ingredient is costing you time and money. Most families eat the same 10 or so favorite dishes over and over. Enlist the help of your family to figure out what those favorites are, print up the ingredients into a shopping list, and take that to the store. Have the list posted on the fridge to mark things off as they’re used up.

Get your kids to help out around the house more. Here are more work from home Mom house cleaning tips

General Mom time management tips

Identify time wasters in your day

It’s a different thing for everyone. Maybe it’s the TV, maybe it’s friends calling to chat in the middle of the day. Maybe it’s activities that seem necessary but that really aren’t productive, like posting a lot in message forums. Whatever it is, identify it and eliminate it if possible, or at least manage it. Use your voicemail, and call people back when it’s a better time for you. Figure out if watching Oprah or the Apprentice is really adding value to your life or just wasting your time.

Make a timer your best friend

A timer has so many uses. You can set it to tell your child when you’ll be available for them. Young children have difficulty comprehending time, and the timer will set them at ease so they won’t bug for you that entire period.

It also keeps you on track and helps you finish up tasks more quickly. Use it when you’re reading email, cleaning house, whenever you want to accomplish something fast.

Have a Routine

Having a routine for your household chores and business activities can really help Moms with time management. When you have a good routine, you can do things without thinking, and they always take up less time that way. Keep your routines written down until they’re memorized. Use an organizing calender or digital system…whatever works best for you. Make sure everyone else in your household knows the basics of your routine so that things flow more smoothly.

Set limits

No one person can do everything. Your time and energy is valuable and you need to be firm in setting limits on how you spend it. Don’t commit to things that you can’t reasonably accomplish. Get enough rest. Learn to say No. Avoid negative people who like to whine.

As Moms we’re constantly working on time management, but with creativity and good routines, we can have a thriving business and a balanced life.

“It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100% – when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.” ~Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Physically, mentally, spiritually, financially, persuasively. . . are you functioning at 100% of your capacity? We’re born to learn, thrive, live and search for happiness, meaning and fulfillment, and yet many find these things to be out of reach. Why is it that some people struggle with their finances, their love relationships, their weight, and a general lack of motivation, while others seem to live up to their full potential with ease?

We’re living in accelerated times with technology advancing faster than we can keep up with it. As a result of all the external stimulation, I believe we have a disconnect with our other-than-conscious selves. Once we repair that disconnection, amazing, miraculous things can happen.

If we consider our subconscious mind a friend, and communicate with it directly, succinctly and, in a way, strictly, we can move mountains.

The gentle giant is a power capable of being harnessed to aid us in our pursuit of fulfillment. They’ve been with us since the minute we were born and since then, they’ve been learning by observing what it is we hear and do.

Everything that goes on around us is being filtered into this other-than-conscious.

As children we were conditioned whether that be through rewards, punishments, through school and experiences. Our other-than-conscious learned too–it learned to expect certain ways of being, creating metaphorical maps of what we could expect out of life based on this early conditioning.

Of its many roles, the subconscious is a powerful persuader–self-persuader–and when you understand this, you are naturally able to engage its help.

The main function of the other-than-conscious is to keep us alive. Another is to keep us doing exactly what we’ve always been doing. This is, at times, problematic, especially when you’re trying to make big changes in your life.

It’s possible that your other-than-conscious has been sabotaged by negative conditioning. It runs on a ‘I can’t do that’ program. This part of the brain is responsible for turning something into a habit by helping you know something on ‘auto pilot’ instead of having to ‘remember’ it. This works both positively and negatively for us.

As we reframe the power of our other-than-conscious as a partner instead of something we hardly ever consider or communicate with, it can really make an enormous difference in our lives.

So the big question is: how do we befriend this gentle giant? Well. . . how do you make any other friend? You gain rapport with them. It’s that easy.

I thought this was silly at first too. I thought, ‘Why do I have to make friends with a part of myself?’ Take that leap of faith and you’re going to find a huge difference in your life.

And this is how to do it: Give yourself a little pep talk. Ask for what you need help with. ‘Dear Gentle Giant. . . I’d love to double our income. I think we’re absolutely worth it.’ Or maybe, ‘Hi. I know we’ve had some rocky relationships and there has been a bad pattern created and now, I’d like to end that and have a great connection. What do you think? Let’s do it together.’

You could also ask for help with things you’re learning, as in, ‘Gentle giant, I would absolutely love to have my persuasion skills increase exponentially. You are really the one I can count on for help.’

Everything that you are, everything that you do, and everything that you have began with your intention to have it in one way or another is controlled by your other-than-conscious mind. All you have to do is tap into your persuasive power and your persuasion skills will naturally develop.

Deputy Dawg Days!

I recently had a client that wanted to change her ‘self-esteem’. Since I have never seen a ‘self-esteem’ I had to figure out exactly what she was talking about before I could determine whether or not we could change ‘it’. Self-esteem falls into the category of metaphysical beasties that are actually a collection of actions that we try to abbreviate into a thing in order to make ‘it’ easier to talk about. My test of true ‘thingness’ is whether or not the alleged ‘thing’ can be sliced into my weekly pot of gumbo. I suspected her ‘self-esteem’ failed my gumbo test. After very few minutes of conversation I found that was indeed the case. Her ‘self-esteem’ was a conversational convenience, but therapeutically a major inconvenience. She had a bucket full of habitual thoughts that she would think about herself, most of which seemed uncomplimentary. By linguistically freezing that bucket of thinking (actions) into a frozen ice sculpture thing called ‘self-esteem’ she made a delightful table decoration that was very good at resisting change. Actions are almost always easier to change than things. In NLP lingo this process of de-animating a verb into a noun is called ‘nominalization’.

Once I convinced her to disregard the big scary ‘self-esteem’ monster, and start examining the specific thinking that contributed to how she felt about herself, she discovered a recurring pattern. She habitually talked herself into feeling bad about herself. Many of these internal voices that she heard weren’t even hers. Some were the voices (as well as content and tone) of her parents. Some of the voices she heard were past acquaintances. Even her children got to speak their piece on the soundstage between her ears. The result was an ongoing narrative attack of her relative worth. Her internal voices rarely, if ever, made her feel good.

There are a few basic points about these voices. First, she is not unique; we all seem to have them. Secondly, while we may recall the first time we heard the voice, we keep playing the voice over and over, whether in our own voice, or the original, like the proverbial, and now archaic, broken record. We do this, even though the historic incident prompting the initial iteration of the voice has long since passed. It’s like we’ve been deputized to continue making ourselves feel bad while the original speaker is off to do other things, lost interest, or even passed on. For all we know, the original speaker may even have changed their mind, and would not be caught dead saying the things we are still replaying.

Complicating matters somewhat is the often-observed fact that we rarely, if ever, question the accuracy of these internal voices and the thinking that they express. If they say it, we believe it, and allow ourselves to entertain feelings accordingly. This phenomenon can be problematic until we change the content and nature of that thinking, then it is cause for celebration. If the voices started singing your praises, reminding you of the great things you have done and will do, and you accepted those voiced thoughts as readily as you accepted the less flattering thinking, then the mythical ‘self-esteem’ wouldn’t be an issue.

The process we used to change the nature of the thoughts this client was busy thinking was to first change the tone of the voice talking. It is a little difficult to feel too bad when the internal voice berating you is in a squirrelly falsetto, like Alvin the Chipmunk. Then, to impact the significance of the voices even more, I asked her to add calliope circus music to the background. If you have a visual image that accompanies the critical voice, go ahead and paint clown faces on the speakers to go along with the whimsical tunes. While stopping the voices completely is difficult, changing their quality is relatively easy. Making these simple alterations in the voices helped free her from the unpleasant impact of the old voices. She was smiling.

We could have stopped there, and I suspect her bucket of thoughts would have been easier to entertain. Of course we didn’t stop. Since she already had this wonderful ready-made piece of internal audio equipment playing, we decided why not use it to play some great thoughts!

I had her recall some good things people had said to her in the past. I also had her make up some things that folks would have said had they known how incredible she really was. I did have to coach her a bit on this, but it’s amazing how your brain can start thinking these pleasant thoughts once the distraction of the belittling thoughts is reduced. The resulting good feelings are often sufficient motivation to keep those great thoughts coming. Of course, she may backslide from time to time, but now she knows she has editorial privileges, and can change the content, and the quality of those internally voiced thoughts any time she is ‘of a mind to’.

I re-deputized her as the sheriff in charge of making sure she felt good.

This is another helpful mind management tip from Richard Lefever and the brain weavers at Quit! Check out our web-site at www.quitsmokingoregon.com.

For most people, blushing is a normal reaction to being embarrassed. However, for people who have a problem with excessive blushing, embarrassment is far from the only trigger for blushing. For problem blushers, blushing occurs frequently and in response to all types of situations and events.

People who blush excessively seem to blush randomly, with no visible triggering event. However, blushing is always a physical reaction to some type of mental trigger. It can be triggered by embarrassment, being in the limelight, being concerned about perceptions of other people, and even by simply being fearful of blushing. People who blush excessively tend to be hypersensitive to being judged by other people, and so frequently blush any time they feel that other people are watching or thinking about them.

Problem blushers become even more self conscious as a result of their excessive blushing, and so frequently develop a phobia associated with blushing. Unfortunately, being afraid of blushing often becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for problem blushers that exacerbates the problem.

When problem blushers become aware that they have tendency to blush more frequently than other people, their first reaction is often to try to control their blushing. They become fixated on trying to control blushing, and thus come to live with a constant dread of blushing. Such a reaction leads to efforts to resist blushing, which are often futile and counterproductive.

The more a problem blusher tries not to blush, the more likely the person is to blush. The act of mentally focusing on blushing, or trying to avoid blushing, can be a mental trigger that brings on a physiological blushing reaction. When blushing is on a person’s mind all of the time, blushing is likely to occur with a greater frequency and intensity. Therefore, the more a person tries to ward off blushing, the more problems the person is likely to experience with blushing.

The fear of blushing can be a tormenting experience for someone people who blush excessively. Excessive blushing that one cannot control is both stressful and frustrating, and can lead to serious self esteem and social problems. Problem blushing and the fear associated with it can even lead to depression if it continues unchecked.

One of the best ways to reduce problem blushing is to stop fighting it so much. There are many useful tips and suggestions that can help problem blushers learn to let go of the fear that intensifies their problem blushing behavior.

One excellent resource is Blushing Free, a downloadable audio book by author Gary Ambrosh. To immediately begin learning how to reduce problem blushing, visit BlushingFree.com. Your quality of life will be greatly enhanced when you learn to control the problem blushing that causes unnecessary social stress and anxiety in your daily life.