Working at home is a highly variable proposition. Some days it’s easy, the kids cooperate and you get a lot done. Other days all they want is you. Not their toys, not each other, not anyone else. You.

When you really need to work, it can be enough to make you want to scream. What does it take to get a little peace and quiet to get your work done?

You could always tell them you’re going to play hide and go seek, and see how long they hide for, but that’s just asking for trouble when they figure out that you’re really trying to work. Although one of my nieces did keep hiding for a long time at a family gathering once, content so long as someone called out a number like they were counting once in a while. It was pretty funny.

But for regular use you’re going to have to come up with routines to minimize the times that they are demanding your attention, and find ways to keep them busy so that you can work.

Get the Kids Out of the House

Getting the kids safely out of the house is a favorite method of mine. The best is when they can go play at a friend’s house. It may be necessary to reciprocate and have the friend over at a later date, but that’s usually not a bad deal, as having friends over can keep your kids almost as willing to leave you alone as having them at the friend’s house.

If no friends are available, having them play in the front or backyard, as safe and appropriate, is a great choice. Your ability to do this depends on the ages of your children and where you live, naturally. Having a sandbox, swingset and other activities available is a big help when sending the kids out to play.

Is This Job Really Necessary This Minute?

Ir you’re stressing about it, possibly it is something you need to handle right away. But if it isn’t, calm down and take care of the kids for a little. Enjoy being a parent.

How Long Do You Need?

If the job won’t take long, or you can afford to take a break soon, set a timer. Short times are necessary with younger children, who certainly won’t understand that the job is going to take you only another hour or so. That’s long for little kids. A timer gives the kids something to look at to know that you will be available soon.

Who Else Can Handle the Kids?

If you aren’t home alone with the kids, who else can help with them? Your spouse? Can one of the older kids be responsible just for a little while?

When you’re working at home, teaching your family to respect your work hours is vital. If they don’t respect when you’re working they’re always going to be distracting you.

This is particularly important for spouses and partners. If they work outside the home, they get a set time where you probably aren’t contacting them much with problems with things going on at home. Ask the same of them and close your home office door.

Haul Out the Laptop

If you have a laptop, make the most of it! Pack it and the kids up and go to the playground, assuming they’re old enough to not need your help on the apparatus. They’ll burn off some energy and have fun while you keep a light eye on them. This only works if your kids are good about how they play. Otherwise, skip the laptop and just head to the playground. It’s amazing what a half hour can do.

You can also use your laptop to work in other rooms of the house. I’ve found this particularly useful with my kids, as I can be there to watch them play or do crafts, and talk to them, but still get a little bit of work done. My laptop has been quite the help in being more productive.

Declare a Quiet Reading Time

This is for kids old enough to read. Tell them they can sit down and read for a time. Don’t stress about which books they read, let them enjoy their favorites.

Get a Sitter

Whether you have a regular daycare provider available or have to call a babysitter, paying for help is sometimes the only way to be productive and fair to your children. Spend the money and try to earn more than it’s costing you.

A mother’s helper is a good option too. They don’t even need to be able to handle all the duties of a babysitter if they’re just good at playing with your kids and letting you know if there’s a real need for your presence.

Talk About Your Work While You Work

Kids love to know how their parents earn money. Show them what you’re doing. If there’s something they can help with, have them help.

Work Nights

It may not be fun to need to work nights, but if that’s what it takes to get things done without distractions, do it! I work more in the evenings after my kids are in bed than I do most days because that’s my quietest time… aside from any distractions my husband can cook up.

Nap times are useful also as long as they last, even if only one child is taking a nap. Declare it quiet play time for all other children or let them play on the computer or watch a show.

Eat as a Family

As much as possible, eat all your meals together. It’s a simple time to be together as a family and talk about what’s going on in everyone’s lives. This gives the kids some of the attention they need at a time you couldn’t work productively anyhow. No TV, no computers, no cell phones, no regular phones, no video games, etc.

Take Breaks

So many people who work at home don’t take enough breaks at all. Just think about how often you’d take a break in an office job.

Getting away from the computer at least once an hour is good for you. It lets your eyes adjust at different distances. It gives your arms, wrists and hands a break. It gives your mind a break. It gets your body moving.

Use your breaks to enjoy being with your kids.

Have Quick, Healthy Snacks Readily Available

My kids know what they’re allowed to have as snacks without having to ask for permission. This is a huge help. Best are chopped up vegetables and fresh fruits, but you can also have crackers and such available. Set up basic rules on snacking, and the “I’m hungry” complaints will be less of a problem.

Lots of Craft Supplies

Encourage your kids to be creative by having supplies ready for them. Better have a special place where they can make a mess, because spilled paints and other messes happen.

Let Them Use the Other Computer

If you have a second computer, let the kids go play. There are tons of great sites out there for children to enjoy. My kids like BellaSara (beware the card collecting habit this may induce!), Nick Jr., Playhouse Disney, Starfall, PBS Kids and Yahoo Kids.

Making a home business successful is hard. There are some things you can control, mostly what you do yourself or hire someone to do for you, and other things that you cannot control. It’s really easy to focus on the parts you can’t directly control, forgetting that the things you can control can help the parts you don’t directly control.

Visitors to Your Site

You don’t directly control whether or not your website gets visitors. You can do everything possible to make it attractive to visitors and search engines, but sometimes that doesn’t bring in traffic.

You can control your link building activities. You can control your spending on pay per click advertising. You control whether or not you make videos or podcasts to bring in traffic.

You don’t know for certain if any of these will work or if any will suddenly quit working. But you can learn what makes them more likely to work for you.

With search engine traffic, expect that changes will happen sometimes. Your rankings go up, your rankings go down, your rankings fall into a deep, dark, dank pit leaving you wondering if you’ll ever see them again.

You can’t control that. You can try to influence with link building, but you can’t control it.

Even pay per click traffic you can’t control completely. You may get a new competitor or the algorithm that decides which ads get what space can change and you now have to rework your campaigns to go along with it. That’s online business for you.

Buyers

You can’t control whether or not people will buy from you. You can have the best copywriting, the most useful products and the best price, and still a certain percentage will not buy from you.

You can use what information you have to improve the odds that people will buy from you. You can test ads, ad placement, the copy describing the product, and if it’s your own product, your shopping cart, the checkout process, everything to do with how people buy from you or through your links that you control.

Work on these factors that you do have control over to make the most of the visitors who might turn into buyers. Thats’ the control you have.

Life and Chaos

No one has complete control over how their life goes. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times obstacles throw themselves enthusiastically into your way and make it hard to run your online business the way you used to.

You can control how you meet these challenges. You can hire someone to help you so that even when things get a little rough parts of your business will keep on going with less input from you. You can ask for guest posts on your blog. You can plan for problems.

You can’t be ready for every contingency, but you can cut down the ways that you can be caught unprepared. Think of where you want your business to go and take steps to help it move in that direction.

The advantages to self employment are great when it works out, but there are a lot of disadvantages. For most of us it’s not a perfectly smooth road. Paying attention to the disadvantages helps you to deal with them as they come up.

1. Erratic Income

This is a disadvantage many of us deal with, particularly in the early days but it can also hit people who have been working for themselves for some time. There’s no guarantee of income when you work for yourself and there’s no guarantee that it will be enough to pay your business expenses, never mind living expenses.

2. Higher Taxes

When you work for someone else, they pay a part of the taxes due on your income. You will be responsible for all of your Social Security taxes. You may have to pay taxes or fees locally as well for the privilege of being in business.

If you’re doing at all well, you’ll need to pay taxes quarterly, not just filing annually. It’s not too hard if you know what you’re earning and can estimate what you should be paying each quarter, but if your income goes up and down a lot this can be challenging. It’s also tough if you’re just making enough to get by before taxes. They still have to be paid.

3. No Benefits

When you work for someone else, they often offer benefits such as health coverage, dental, paid days off, retirement funds and so forth. You have to pay for these yourself if you work for yourself. Health and dental aren’t so bad if you have a spouse whose job offers them, but they’re pretty tough to handle on your own.

4. Having to Collect Payments

When you work for yourself, you have to collect the payments due to you. If a client or business fails to pay you, that’s a direct impact on your income.

5. Maintaining Your Own Equipment

Whatever you need to run your business, a computer, an internet connection and so forth, they’re your responsibility and your expense. When problems happen, you have to take what could have otherwise been productive time away and deal with them.

It’s Not All Bad

These challenges don’t mean give up on the dream of working for yourself. They’re just something to be aware of, so you don’t get caught completely off guard. For those who enjoy working for themselves and the many opportunities that brings, the advantages far outweigh these disadvantages.

Flexibility, the potential for a significantly better income than at a job, the fun in taking the risks, being your own boss… being self employed is something I wouldn’t trade. The difficulties are only a small part of the story.

I’ve never been the most social of people. Working at home suits me well because of that, in part. This makes dealing with social media sites such as Twitter challenging for me. It’s hard to know what to say sometimes.

This is a problem for a lot of people. But you can work with these sites if you come up with a good routine.

Remember the Social in Social Media

The first thing to remember is that these are social websites. Yes, I know that’s a big part of the problem. It’s also a part of the solution.

You see, people like it when you retweet them. They like it when you respond.

You can’t be too random about this, and I really do not suggest automating this, not that it would be easy to automate anyhow.

Set up a schedule for how many times a day you want to look for someone to reply to or retweet. You don’t want this to take up too much of your day or you won’t get other kinds of online marketing or business work done, but you should set aside some time. Just look through the tweets you have recently received from others and see what gets your attention.

You should pay attention for a little while after you reply to someone in case they reply back, of course. There can be some great networking going on with these sites, but you’ll miss out if you never reply back to people.

Plan Topics for Your Tweets

I like to keep my tweeting natural and not plan out specific tweets in advance, although some people do that. Instead I figure out what topics I should be tweeting about for each account, and if I come across something, it can be tweeted. It can be things I’m working on, things the kids are up to, questions I have, and so forth.

If you want to schedule a tweet, you can do that with sites such as HootSuite. This has its uses, but I don’t like it so well for regular tweets. It can be handy if you’re posting something and want to make sure it’s seen at the right time in different time zones.

Tweet Your Blog Posts

One thing I do like to schedule is the tweeting of my blog posts. It makes sense to me. You can do this manually as well, but sites such as TwitterFeed make it easy to schedule them.

If you’re lucky, your blog post will get some Twitter attention, maybe some retweets and visitors to your site.

One thing that is important is to remember that tweeting your blog posts is not the only thing you should be doing on Twitter. You’re not being very social if you do. On the other hand, if that’s all you want to do with that particular account, people will catch on and decide for themselves if you are worth following. Some do use Twitter to replace following RSS feeds in a reader.

Follow Others

There are a few ways to get followers, but it starts with following others.

Find people who share your interests and tweet interesting things. Not only will this make Twitter more fun for you, it makes it easier to find things to reply to or retweet. Why follow anyone who bores you? You can use Twitter directories to find people with similar interests.

You’ll get new followers pretty much no matter what you do yourself. Some say follow all of them back, I disagree. I follow back only if they’re interesting. Otherwise I’d be following far too many spam accounts to see what the real people are doing.

Some also say to unfollow anyone who doesn’t follow you back. Once again, I disagree. I’ll follow those who find me interesting, no matter if they choose to follow me or not. We all have our own criteria for what makes a good Twitter experience. Following people is a great way to get them to at least look at your Twitter account, and so it can increase the number of followers you have.

There are people who like to direct messsage people who follow them. That’s not a recommendation I would give, doubly so if it’s done automatically, triply if you DM them with an ad for your site or product. Send direct messages when you have something to say privately. Doing it wrong irritates people and can get you labeled as a spammer.

Forget the Numbers Game… to an Extent

Success in social media is in large part a numbers game, but don’t focus just on your numbers. Following just anyone isn’t going to help you. Following people who might be in your target market may help you. As many other things, quality beats quantity.

You want to build your numbers up some by following others, but your best results will come from being interesting. Even when this doesn’t come naturally to you, it must be your focus.

You don’t need to be an absolute chatterbox to use Twitter. Just tweet helpful and interesting things. This sounds easier than it is, but once you build the habits it’s not too difficult. You’re a real person and that should come across in your tweets.

I’m feeling unusually organized this summer. I actually bought school supplies for my son already since kindergarten is starting in less than a month here.

It probably has to do with registering my oldest for homeschool. It got me thinking on what my son will need to go to school.

We did good. I bought his backpack and lunch bag for under $10 all together. Hopefully they’ll last more than one school year, but with kids it’s hard to tell. At least he likes them.

If selection is what you’re thinking on for your kids, this is the time to shop, before it’s all picked over. I bought my son’s stuff over at Ross, so the selection was already pretty small but they had some he liked.

I’m sure there will be a lot of back to school sales coming up, but I don’t think I could beat the price I paid by shopping already. Any my son’s happy. That’s a pretty good deal.

It still feels like the middle of summer to me, though. Hardly seems possible that school is coming up so fast.