With the holiday season coming to a close, it’s hard to resist looking back at how my year has been. And what a year it has been!

Lots of lows. My earnings have been lousy for most of the year.

A part of that I can attribute to how little work I’ve gotten done most of the year compared to what I would have liked to get done. A chunk of that is from adapting to having a baby in the house and being generally amazed at how much extra work a third child is even when you already have two. Wow! Selene’s a wonderful baby but she wreaks havoc with my productivity when it comes to business.

Moving away from Poway was a bit of a low and a high. Didn’t want to leave our family and friends, but at least my husband finally got a better job.

That one also made a mess of my productivity, of course. Packing to move is hard and so is unpacking.

But this year also had some amazing moments, like being mentioned in an article that hit the front page of Yahoo and Bankrate. Promptly followed by the thud of  “my hosting wasn’t ready for that kind of traffic,” but Host Gator helped me get back on track in a painful but really not that possible to reduce amount of time.

And the traffic was still amazing. Naturally that resulted in a pretty good income month, and I wish I had managed to get my ads better tested before then, because I likely would have earned more still.

There was another amazing part of that article, specifically that I knew about it at all. That aforementioned move…

I had been interviewed for the article months before, and had expected it to be published much sooner. Instead, it hit it big just a very few days after I had my internet access turned back on in my new home. A few days sooner and I would have missed the whole thing. That would have been beyond agonizing. So I count myself quite fortunate there, that I had the chance to deal with it at all.

And of course, even though she’s added new levels of challenge to my ability to work productively, Selene’s birth has to be listed as a high, as does continuing to watch her develop.

The move and having a baby are what I consider to be physical blocks to productivity. There quite simply were no ways to get around them. Quite possibly I could have limited their impacts more, but it wouldn’t have been easy.

But the mental challenges were far worse. They usually are. It’s so easy to fall into slacking off, spending too much time reading information and not enough time acting on it or any other information.

I got pretty stuck thinking about the move as well as how hard it was working with a new baby. Like that’s going to get easier any time soon! The time would have been better spent finding ways to work around those challenges.

All in all, it’s been quite a year. It’s been difficult, challenging, busy and wonderful. And I intend to make next year even better!

One of the big ways to make it harder to work on your home business can be the clutter in your own head. Too many ideas of what you want to do, not enough time to do it.

Start thinking out more of what you can do with the time you have. Most people waste a lot of time thinking about what might be and not how they can get there. Having goals is important, but planning how to get there is more important and more productive than just saying “I have a GOAL!”

Also get rid of the negative thoughts that slow you down. I get frustrated by my business sometimes… I think we all do. But if I take too much time focusing on the negative I won’t get anything done.

Better is to take the problems and figure out how to make them right. Work with them! Don’t focus on the negative, focus on making things right.

The more you can focus on what you can get done and will get done, the more productive you have the chance to be. Give it a try and head on to a productive new year.

The end of the year means it’s getting close to when you’ll want to get your taxes ready. While you don’t have everything you will need in order to get them done yet, you’re getting awfully close to when you will need to get them done.

Take some time now to get a head start on getting organized for tax time. This makes it easier to complete them when you need to.

Remember, quarterly taxes are due January 15.

If you’re getting a refund this time, you’ll want to be organized so that you can get it as soon as possible. If you’re having to pay more in you’ll probably want to hold off as long as you can, but you need to be organized enough to know what your situation is.

Sooo… how many free reports and other junk do you have cluttering up your hard drive? It’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of downloading tons of information and never doing anything with it.

Rather than leaving them in your eternal “I thought I would do this but I really won’t” pile, get rid of them. Those free reports you’ll never act on. The ebooks you know you aren’t going to read.

Sure, your computer has a ton of hard drive space but this isn’t about freeing up space. It’s about freeing yourself to be more productive. Having junk in your work space can slow you down with “I ought to’s.”

No, I’m not working today and if your family celebrates Christmas I hope you aren’t either! I even wrote this post a few days ago!

If you’re looking for some end of the year cleanup work to do, take a look around! Come up with your own ideas and share them in the comments.

I try to keep a vague sense of organization of my paperwork throughout the year, but often enough it gets a little chaotic. This is a good time to get half organized or completely chaotic paperwork into more of a semblance of order.

That’s anything you’ve printed out for later reading. Check stubs. Bills. Notes on what you want to accomplish that you’ve written out. All the random papers that have to do with your business that you want to keep. All the other papers that seem to materialize from nowhere.

You may have taken the first step toward this if you did yesterday’s idea of cleaning your desk. But did you really organize things or just get them approximately where you need them to be?

Really think about which papers you need to keep. It’s amazing how many things you think you need to keep really aren’t that important when you look at them a month or two later. If you aren’t really going to refer back to it and you don’t need to keep it in order to have accurate records do you really need to hold onto it?

If you’re like me, your desk gets pretty messy. Mine gets the mail on it, my daughter’s returned school work, random baby toys and things that I actually need for my business. It gets messy pretty quickly.

In preparation for the new year, this is a great time to get it all cleaned up.

With a computer I don’t always need a perfectly clear desk as such, but it can really help mentally. Clutter can be distracting. Sometimes important papers even end up in the clutter.

If your work area is in a common area of the house rather than an office you can close off, it’s also nice to have things look good for the holidays.

Reading and commenting on blog posts can be a good use of time or a complete time suck. Take some time before the end of the year and figure out which blogs in your reader are worth your while.

In some ways this is like yesterday’s suggestion to clean out your email newsletter subscriptions. You don’t want to read the blogs that aren’t providing you good information or are overly promotional.

But you should add in some consideration for which ones you comment on. Whether the links are follow or no follow, blog comments can be useful in bringing attention to your own site. Think about which blogs you often find you have some thoughts to contribute.

Also keep subscribing to any blogs that you are considering being a guest blogger on. You want to keep up on what topics get covered there and on any requests they have for guest posts.

As the end of the year gets closer, it’s a good time to clear out some of the clutter that slows you down as you work. Email is a great place to start.

If you’re like me, you end up subscribing to a lot of newsletters over time. Some turn out to be worth reading, others just end up being deleted unread.

If you’ve been letting subscriptions get out of hand, it’s time to start rethinking each one.

There are a lot of good reasons to clear out a particular newsletter. Many do little more than hype the next big product launch. It can be interesting to see what’s out there, but you should only be buying information that you can use at the time. Buy too many products and you’re not going to have the time to use any of them.

Don’t just hit the delete button on newsletters you know you aren’t reading. Open it up and hit the unsubscribe link.

You should also be thinking if you’re getting good information from the ones you do read. If you’re getting information that helps you in your personal or professional life it’s probably worth reading. If you really enjoy the newsletter it’s probably also worth reading. If you aren’t sure, it’s probably time to unsubscribe.

Be pretty free about unsubscribing. You aren’t likely to really miss any that you unsubscribe from, but if you do you can always go back to its site and resubscribe.

I just got word that SBI! is having their buy one, get one free holiday sale on right now. It runs until December 25, 2009.

SBI! is great for helping to build businesses. They have some pretty good results to show too. They work for many kinds of online businesses, from direct sales to affiliate marketing to selling your own products or services.

You can use this sale to get two SBI! sites for yourself or give one to a family member or friend while keeping one for yourself. It could be a lot of fun if you and a friend are both trying to get going with a home business, as so many people are.

Take a look at the potential starting your own site has. This is a great time to get started. Call it a Christmas gift and New Year’s resolution combined into one.

And get moving. December 25, 2009 is not that far away.