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Is Productivity a Goal?

We all start home businesses for different reasons. Some of us want to have something to do while we are home raising children, others of us want to branch out into a field we are passionate about on the side while we continue to work a day job. Still others of us start a home business with definite financial and career goals to guide us. Regardless of your motivation for starting a home business, we each have to decide whether or not we will focus on productivity and make increasing our productiveness a goal… For me, productivity is a major … Continue reading →

New Year Scrapbooking Goals 2008

First, I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year and a safe and prosperous 2008. It is hard to believe we have completed another year in our lives. It has almost been two years since I started with families.com as well. Time seems to just fly by in a rapid pace, and if we blink, we just might miss something. This is why scrapbooking is such a significant hobby. It is a great way to preserve the everyday life that occurs and save it for future generations. And if you aren’t interested in future generations, then it’s just … Continue reading →

Ways to Turn Off the “Time Wasters”

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Today, there are many people who work from home. There are freelancers whose entire career consists of working from home. The best way to ensure productivity while you are working from home is to turn off the “time wasters”. Before you can do that, you must identify the things that are slowing you down. Social Media Social media can be tricky for freelancers. Writers and bloggers are often working on assignments that require them to write about the “hot topic” of the day. Social media, especially Twitter, has become the go-to for the latest news. The goal is to find … Continue reading →

Have You Lost Your Spark?

Sometimes, you might wonder where along the way the sizzle with which you started out as a home – based professional began to fizzle. It is only natural for our passion and energy for our work to ebb and flow right along with other things that are happening in our lives. However, in order to have a successful home – based business, it is important that we keep our passion and energy as high as we can as much of the time as we can so that we consistently generate top quality work. That is a tall order, especially since … Continue reading →

Success Literature Is Good Inspiration

When you own and operate your own home – based business, you will quickly discover that you are in charge of many things. If your home – based business is a one person operation, than you are actually in charge of everything. This may be quite a departure from whatever your responsibilities were at the jobs that you had before you made the switch to working for yourself and working from home. Depending upon what jobs you had, you may have occasionally been involved in workplace activities that were designed to inspire or motivate you and your coworkers to do … Continue reading →

The Ready Pile

I’ve been having difficulty getting my work started. There are two things I need to be actively working on for the next week (and longer) but I haven’t been able to find the time. I finally realized that my problem was preparation. I am a far cry from the romantic ideal of writers who magically dip their quill into their pot of ink and begin to manically scribble brilliance onto their parchment paper for eternal noteriety. I tend to (like most people) need some amount of preparation, even if it is just entering a certain state of mind. Dissertations and … Continue reading →

It’s Two O’Clock, Do You Know Where Your Energy Went?

You know the feeling. It is a while after lunch and you are sitting at your desk, working. All of a sudden, you realize that you are tired. Not just a little tired, either. The kind of tired where all that you can do is think about how tired you are, and how much you would like to go to sleep right then and there. You are experiencing the afternoon slump, and you are not alone. What causes the afternoon slump? Afternoon tiredness is a natural part of our circadian rhythms, those daily cycles that are biologically hard-wired into our … Continue reading →

Organizing Your Day in a Logical Way

Working from home on a home business requires that we learn how to motivate ourselves and organize our time and make decisions about when, how long, and on what we will be working. While some people take to this with ease, most of the people I have met take a little while to get the hang of things when they start their home businesses. It takes some time to figure out how to organize one’s day in a logical and productive way. I confess that while I pride myself on being fairly organized, not every work day is the same … Continue reading →

Getting Back to Work after Interruptions

Interruptions are a part of an ordinary day—whether you work at home or work a traditional job. Trying to stay focused is challenging, but getting pulled away for one thing or another is typical and often we cannot even control it. I find that the additional challenge comes when I have to try to get BACK to work after an interruption… Those of us who run home businesses can get very used to interruptions. Whether we have children at home who need our attention or other responsibilities—the phone rings, someone knocks at the door, we have to run out for … Continue reading →

Should You Set Personal Benchmarks?

The other day, I wrote about ways to track your productivity and the work that you are doing in your home business by creating categories and subject areas. While this may be helpful for some, there are other ways to periodically check to see if we are moving forward and following our overall plan to build our business. If you have a determined goal and a plan that you are using to grow your business, you can also create “benchmarks” or areas where you can stop, reflect, re-evaluate and check off once you have achieved them. A “benchmark” is really … Continue reading →