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.