Working from home can be challenging for the most devoted mom, but add in kids and the potential for problems is increased a thousand fold. Spending time with your kids is of course the entire reason you want to work from home, so preparing for issues that may arise is essential. Organizing your work area, and finding ways to involve your children will help your day go smoothly.

Setting Up Your Office

Whether you are just starting the search for a work at home job, or you’ve been working from home for years now, your office space can probably be spruced up. It doesn’t matter if you have a separate office or plan on working from the dining room table, you need to be organized to make the most of your time. Make a list of the things you will need to use throughout the day, from pens and notebooks, to calculators and phones. Now think about where you need these items to be placed in order to reach them without interrupting your work. Baskets, mugs, and drawers can help you hide things while keeping them in easy reach. If you are running a business with a lot of products you’ll have to consider shelves or other systems to sort and group items easily.

While you are considering the items and space you need to create for your work area, don’t forget to design around the activities your children will be doing while you are working. A small table beside you, or in your line of vision is great for toddlers, while you may want space for a bouncer for a baby. A small shelf area with toys, crayons or craft supplies will help keep them engaged while you complete projects.

Emergency Toys

No matter how organized you are, and what type of space you’ve put together for your children, there will come a time when you really need them to be occupied and they just aren’t interested in their current toys. Keeping an emergency stash with items they’ve never seen before is a great way to redirect their attention long enough for you to finish that phone call or writing deadline. The dollar store is a great place to buy small inexpensive toys.

The Egg Timer

Children are wonderful little beings, but they don’t really have a concept of time. When you ask them to be quiet so you can finish a phone call, they don’t understand how long that will take. Introducing an egg timer will help your little one stay focused as well as yourself. Start with 1-3 minutes and work your way up to 15-20 over a couple of weeks.
If you begin the egg timer training when you don’t have anything important to do the results will be better. Once the kids understand how it works you can put it into actual practice. Start the timer by saying how long you need them to entertain themselves and be extra quiet, give them a project to do or suggest a toy, and as soon as the timer dings make sure you praise them and give them a hug so they enjoy the process.

Get the Kids Involved in Organizing

Keeping your office area organized as well as the kids play area can seem daunting. Kids want to help out, and if you make the organizing time fun they’ll be even more excited. Set aside 10-15 minutes at the end of your day and bring out the egg timer again. Tell the kids it’s a race to see who can pick up the most toys by the time the timer goes off. While the kids are taking care of their area you can put your own items away or create your to do list for the next day.

Guest Post By: ClutterGeeks.com – Philadelphia
organizer helping reduce and eliminate clutter in Philadelphia and Bucks County PA

Finding a work at home job has never been easy. There are a lot of people out there looking for those jobs, and only so many jobs available. But sometimes you need the money but really can’t get a job outside the home while you wait for a work at home job to come available. It can be a tough situation.

How do you make money until you find more regular work you can do at home?

Garage Sale!

Having a garage sale is one way to declutter and get some money at the same time. You can clean out a lot of things you don’t need anymore with one garage sale.

There are disadvantages of course. It’s kind of a one off. Once the stuff is sold, you don’t have any more to sell to make more money.

You’ll also be fighting off bargain hunters who just want stuff as cheap as they can get it. Figuring out when bargaining is worth it versus sticking to your price isn’t always easy.

Craigslist

If you have less stuff to sell, Craigslist is another good way to go. Some things go very quickly.

You may still have to deal with bargain hunters, but you may also get multiple calls on your listing. With any luck you’ll quickly know if standing firm on your price is going to work.

Try Freelance Writing

Serious freelance writers can earn some good money, but if you just want a little to tide you over until you get whatever kind of work you’re looking for, some basic freelance writing can bring in some money.

Some sites even make it easy. Seed.com is owned by AOL. Their expectations are high and they do not accept every article you submit. The higher the pay, the more likely it is that you will need to do some serious research for it. I’ve seen assignments there that involve interviewing multiple people and getting their pictures. Most assignments aren’t as involved as that, of course.

Demand Studios pays a bit less, but they have quite a number of assignments available. They review your qualifications as a writer before allowing you to work, however. I’ve done some writing for them, and it’s not too hard to get an article accepted. The editors review your article and when they make suggestions they’re generally quite useful.

Associated Content is another possiblity, but probably the lowest paying of these three. On the plus side, you can get bonuses based on page views, so if something of yours becomes popular you may get a little extra pay.

You can also check sites such as Freelance Writing Jobs to see if you qualify for any of the gigs people have posted there.

Tutor

What subjects were you good at in school? Do you think you could find a few students in need of tutoring?

Start a Home Business

Yeah, take a little risk. Or not. You could always go the free route with a Blogger or WordPress.com blog.

Running a blog may or may not make you any significant money, but it will keep you busy and may be good for your resume if you keep your blog relevant to the type of work you’d like to be doing. Show off your knowledge!

You may be able to earn a little from product recommendations with affiliate links. Make sure you have some sort of disclosure about affiliate and other relationships to products mentioned on your blog.

Most bloggers do not earn very much, but it can be worth a try. You can spend money on this if you want to, but if things are that tight, free may be the way to go. But hosting and a domain name aren’t much to spend if you can afford it.

Doing Small Jobs on Amazon Turk

Many of these don’t pay so well, but the lower the pay the easier it should be.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a program through Amazon.com where people ask for small jobs to be done. You complete it, they’re supposed to pay you. Just be sure that you accept the hit before you do the work so that someone else doesn’t beat you to it. It doesn’t matter if the job’s only going to take you a couple of minutes. You don’t want to waste your time and not get paid for something you did just because the opportunity vanished.

CloudCrowd is a similar program that requires you to have a Facebook account. I don’t know as much about them, but looking around I find several people who have tested them and been paid through their Paypal email address. It looks like work has at times been inconsistent in its availability.

Try Tips from Emergency Cash Generators

Yes, you’d have to buy this one, although you get a free preview of a few tips if you subscribe on their site. Emergency Cash Generators is currently just $39.99 and has the usual Clickbank guarantee. It has about 100 ideas listed and tells you how to implement them.

Are you going to want to try all the ideas? Of course not! But the odds are very good you’ll find something you’d be comfortable doing.

None of these are things that are likely to become your regular source of income. Most people want more. But sometimes even small jobs are just enough to keep you going until things get better. And if you try the home business idea and it takes off, well that would definitely be worth it!

Running a home business isn’t as easy as many people want to tell you. There’s a lot of work involved and you probably aren’t going to get rich. Honest. If it were that easy to get rich, I’d long since be there.

But the worst part is how many mistakes you’re going to make as a home business owner. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to figure it all out. You’re going to make mistakes. We all do.

1. Not wanting to spend any money.

So many people want to start a home business with no money at all. They’ve heard that you shouldn’t pay for a work at home job and apply that principle to their home business. Too bad things don’t work that way.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are free ways to build a home business. They’re just going to take longer and you won’t have control over some of the parts of your business that you really should be maintaining control over, such as having your own website and domain name.

Home businesses are much cheaper to run than other sorts of businesses for the most part, but they’re still likely to cost you something. Domain name. Hosting. Pay per click advertising costs. Website design costs if you can’t do it yourself.

Plus many other places you can spend money and probably should as you build your business. As you start to earn more money you should plan on spending some money just for help with the little things that you don’t directly earn money from. You might be paying a bookkeeper, a virtual assistant, a website designer and so forth. You might start paying for more kinds of adverting to really get your business name out there and help it grow.

Done right these are investments in your business. Done wrong….

2. Spending too much money on your home business.

It’s at least as easy to spend too much as too little on your home business. Once you realize the power of hiring someone else to do the things that you don’t enjoy so much it can be easy to spend more than your business income can support.

Never spend more on your business than you can afford to. This amount will vary tremendously as your business grows and as the economy changes.

Everything you spend on your business is a risk. You may not get that money back. Your goal is to get that money back and then some, but there’s no guarantee that it will ever happen. Don’t risk more than you and your family can afford.

As I said above, a home business doesn’t have to cost much. If you’re only using free advertising methods such as article marketing, Twitter and so forth your only monthly cost may well be the cost of your hosting. Add in the annual cost of your domain name and that’s still pretty cheap.

3. Trying to be someone you’re not.

Maybe it’s a habit from working outside the home, but a lot of people try to act more formal than they should when they run a home business. They want to sound like a bigger company.

Sometimes it’s the personal touch that really wins out. And that’s where your home business ought to excel.

Don’t pretend to be a big company. Don’t pretend to have a bunch of employees. Represent yourself as who you are, whether you’re a blogger with just a few subscribers or you’re already having a ton of success with your business.

Running your business from home has become more common in recent years as technology makes it easier. Many companies are used to dealing with people who are working from home. While you don’t want the kids to interfere with phone calls or anything, most will understand the occasional interruption.

In online businesses such as blogging it’s particularly important to be seen as a real person. Have fun with it. Delight in your business and show that it’s a pleasure to you to do whatever it is you do. Share some of the challenges you face as appropriate. Just be real and admit that what you do isn’t all daisies and unicorns.

If someone wants more professional, they probably want a bigger company. Why ruin your fun and delight in what you do to please people who won’t want to do business with you anyhow?

4. Trusting too much.

It would be nice to be able to trust everyone online. It really would. For that matter it would be nice to be able to trust everyone in the real world. You know that’s just not going to happen.

If contracts are appropriate, get a contract signed. It’s not a guarantee that everything will work out as stated in the contract, but at least you’ll have something if you need to take things to court.

If someone’s telling you that x is a great way to earn money, grab that salt shaker. You’re probably going to need it. There are amazing numbers of people out there willing to say that their way is the next great way to earn money from home, and most of them aren’t precisely honest. To put it mildly.

5. Failing to make your business valuable to others.

Your business had better to valuable to you. Otherwise why bother? But if no one else sees value in what you’re offering, why would they bother coming to you?

6. Failing to change with the times.

Keeping up with the times is tough. Believe me I know. There’s always a new way to do different parts of a business, but deciding which changes are worthwhile is not easy.

Just think back a few years ago before Twitter came on the scene. If you use it now, you may know how great it can be for driving interested traffic to a site. It’s great for networking with people who may be potential customers of your business or may be able to help you grow your business. It’s quite the tool.

It wasn’t so many years ago that Twitter didn’t exist. Now it has helped many people to communicate about their business better, form joint ventures and do a lot more. If you aren’t using it, you are quite possibly missing out.

There are many other ways that your business may be needing to change and grow. Doing things the same way you did last year isn’t the best way to grow in many cases.

The great part about an online business is that there are so many ways to test these changes. You can quickly track what’s working and what isn’t. There’s less guesswork and more data available to you if you care to use it.

7. Ignoring your intuition.

You started your home business because you believed in yourself. You trusted that you would be able to make things work. Why ignore that as you run your business?

If someone is trying to sell you information on a way to grow your business and it just doesn’t sound right, your intuition is probably informing you quite well. If you think a particular client or customer is likely to be trouble, don’t be surprised if it happens if you take their order anyhow.

Your intuition won’t always be right, of course, but if something in you says things aren’t going quite right you should probably pay attention.

8. Trying to be everything to everyone.

So many people have no idea who their target market is with their home business. They may have even been told that everyone they meet is a potential customer.

Liars!

Every product, every service has a target market. If you want to succeed in your business you need to figure out who they are and how to reach them.

If you’re in network marketing, forget the old bit of trying to sell all the time to family and friends. That’s a great way to alienate people if you take it too far.

Instead focus on who is really likely to like what you’re offering. Do some research on who spends money on what you have to offer. Look at what other people in your industry are doing. Think hard about what it is you’re doing and what you’re offering.

Having a focus with your business doesn’t mean you’ll be selling less. You’ll probably sell more when you have a focus because what you’re doing is really speaking to the people who are targeted.

9. Stressing over mistakes made in the past.

You’re going to make mistakes in your business. We all do. But you need to get over that.

Don’t stress over the mistakes you make. Learn from them. Figure out what went wrong and what you should do to make it go right next time.

Sometimes this will mean making some big changes. Other times it will just be a small thing. But if you obsess over the fact that *gasp* something went wrong, you’re not focusing on the solution. You’re going to waste your time thinking about things that aren’t going to help your business grow.

You aren’t going to get everything right at first. You aren’t going to get everything right ever. But if you are aware of the mistakes you make and keep working on improving your business, they don’t have to be a huge problem.

Most kids love watching any sort of construction going on. It could be a house, a street, a high rise, anything. It’s a fascinating process.

If you know of some going on in your area, with a good, safe place to watch for a time, it can be a fun thing to do with the kids. You can talk about what goes into making a building and the different tools and equipment they’re using.

It’s also a good activity to do over time if it’s close enough. Go by once a week or so and see the changes. So long as there’s decent progress it can be pretty impressive.

There’s one very common goal for moms with toddlers in the house – finding time to exercise. That toddler might just be the key to getting your workout done. Who needs a gym membership with a toddler around?

1. The toddler chase.

Take toddler outside. Let him or her get a few steps ahead, then try to catch up.

This works particularly well with really adventurous toddlers. My youngest would gladly get 2-3 houses away from me, in the middle of the street, if I let her.

If your toddler isn’t a runner, it can at least be a nice walk.

2. Sit-ups.

Go ahead. Try to do a sit-up with a toddler around. You’ll probably get a toddler on your tummy. Too bad sit-ups don’t work too well that way.

But you can change up the exercise. Stay in the sit-up position, get that toddler on your shins and start lifting your legs. You will get a workout.

3. What’s in his/her mouth?

Be preoccupied for roughly 0.05 seconds. Realize toddler has put something in his or her mouth and is gagging on it. Remove it from toddlers tightly closed mouth.

4. Kitchen cabinet clear out.

Let toddler into your kitchen. Let him or her clear out the plastic container cabinet and any other cabinet that they can safely play in.

Put everything back as toddler clears out each cabinet over again when you walk off. Repeat.

5. Computer keyboard rescue.

Realize toddler has started pounding on your keyboard, starting random programs and doing things you didn’t realize were possible with just the keyboard.

Whisk toddler away. Spin toddler around in your arms to stop the tears.

6. Crayon on the walls scrub.

Leave just one crayon in reach. When you’re expecting company, discover that toddler has drawn all over the walls with the crayon. Start scrubbing, hoping that this was one of the washable crayons, not the regular sort.

Check to see if toddler also chewed the crayon up. You might be scrubbing the carpet too.

7. Toddler catch.

Discover just barely in time that your toddler can climb the furniture or stairs… sort of. Catch toddler before he or she hits the ground and really starts screaming. Repeat anywhere from daily to several times an hour until toddler gets bored with climbing, gets good at it or is finally ready for a nap.

8. Liquid soap slip-up.

Find out that toddler has used new climbing skills to reach liquid soap dispenser and has now fingerpainted the entire bathroom floor, walls, cabinet and counter. Please note that this exercise is best not done in the middle of the night.

As your toddler keeps you running, just remember that these times go by really fast. Don’t think of all the trouble as trouble. See it as one more way you’re being active.

And don’t worry. Not all of these have happened to me… yet. Selene, don’t get any ideas. Please?