The trouble with working at home is that it’s at home. There are a lot of distractions, especially when you have young children about. But when you’re trying to earn a living you have to get as much as possible done with the time you have.

These are some tips that I’ve found useful when I’m working. Things don’t always work out the way I want them to, but that’s all a part of the challenge!

Forget Multitasking

The more you multitask, the more you’re distracting yourself, more likely than not. Sometimes you can’t avoid multitasking, but if you can focus on one thing at a time you’ll probably be more productive.

How long you work on a particular area is up to you. You may do best in 10-15 minute spurts on a particular activity before moving on to something else. There’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t start checking your email, twittering, checking on your Facebook friends and so forth when you’re supposed to be focused. Save it for a break.

Do your best in this area for distractions kids cause and things around the house. You can’t always tell the kids “later” but teach them to respect when you say you need to work and when to interrupt you anyhow. That’s harder when they’re younger, but they’ll learn in time.

Make Time for Your Kids

I just said it. Kids are distracting. But if you give them the time and attention they need you can have more control over it.

Make time to play with them, but also insist that they play without an adult helping. Kids can and should be doing this daily. Just think of how much fun you probably had as a child playing with no adults involved.

If your children need you when you’re working, try the timer method. Set a time for the time you need to finish what you’re working on or for an amount of time that it’s appropriate to have a child of that age wait. When the timer goes off, stop working and go play.

Don’t do this for more urgent needs, of course.

Plan Your Day

Know what you want to get accomplished every day. Write it down on paper so you have something to check off, if that helps you. Or you can type it into the computer. At the very least have goals in your head. Just something to keep you from working aimlessly throughout the day. That makes it far too easy to goof off.

Trust me. I know.

Having plans and goals help you to realize when you’re allowing yourself to slack off too much. But don’t set them so high that you frustrate yourself because you can never achieve them. Be fair to yourself.

Work at the Times that Are Best for You

Well, at least when possible. If you like working in the middle of the day best, and that’s when other obligations need you most, you’re just out of luck in that area. Pick your next best time for working.

I prefer working at night, after the kids have gone to bed. I don’t get to do that every night, but I try. Second best for me is whenever my youngest goes down for her nap. That one often means working through what would otherwise be lunch time, but a late lunch works well enough for me.

Don’t ask me to get up early in the morning to work. I’ll be cranky. I write at night and then schedule blog posts to come out in the early morning so that early birds can read them if they like, but that does not mean I’m one too.

Take Breaks

There’s a reason why employers are required to give employee breaks. They’re necessary. And even though they feel like they’re taking away precious work time, they will help with your productivity overall. They give your mind the rest it needs.

Separate Work and Home

This is a tough one. You’re home all the time but sometimes you’re working. The two tangle up very easily.

Start with your work space. If you can avoid sharing it with the rest of the home it’s a big help. That doesn’t always work. My office, for example, is also the baby’s play area and my daughter’s homework zone. But they don’t have access to my desk or computer.

This is also why planning out your day is so important. It will help you to separate your home and work life.

Consider Outsourcing

Whether or not you can do this depends on what you do and how your budget looks. But if you can pay someone else to do some of your work you’ll get a lot more other stuff done. Done right, outsourcing will allow you to earn even more money.

But it’s not possible for everyone. It’s more for people running a home business, obviously.

Try to remember that just because you have a particular skill doesn’t mean you shouldn’t outsource it. It makes a lot of sense for many people to hire someone to do their taxes, for example. With modern software you could manage it on your own, but it may not be the right choice.

Similarly, a virtual assistant can be a huge help in some of the basic areas of running a home business. Let someone else handle the routine stuff and focus on the projects that require your special skills.

What Do You Do?

What helps you to be more productive? Any tips you would care to share?

The ability to work at home is a great goal to have, but it can be a bit of a trap too. You can feel like you have to find a work at home opportunity that will allow you to replace your current income before you can make the jump.

Ever think that making the move in stages might make more sense?

Lots of people do it that way. It’s rough, and eats horrendously into family time, but the sacrifice can be worth it. It’s a chance to get things going without the worry that your family will suffer financially.

The Good Part About Starting When You Already Have a Job

There’s good and bad to getting a slow start to working at home. The good is that you have less financial pressure to succeed. Your current job is hopefully enough to keep your family going, even if you aren’t entirely satisfied with the lifestyle.

That cuts a lot of pressure out, giving you more time to really think about what you want to do and to do your due diligence before spending any money or sharing any information.

It also gives you time to build up an income. If you choose a home business, this is likely vital. Most home businesses are not successful right at the start. If your family needs the money from your current work you may be best off not gambling on your ability to build a stable income from home quickly.

You will also enjoy the added time to educate yourself. You can read up on the work you’ll be doing.

You can make connections and network with other work at home parents, both within your industry and who do other kinds of work. A good network will help you to build your business and help you with many challenges. LinkedIn is a good place to start for online professional networking; your local Chamber of Commerce is good for professional networking in person.

The Bad Part

Perhaps the worst part of starting to work at home while still holding down a regular job is the pressure. You have to do your best at both. You lose time with your family.

The amount of time it takes can be difficult. It’s not uncommon to need several months, a year or more to build a decent work at home income.

Combining working outside the home with working at home is also likely to slow down your progress in whatever you do at home. It’s tough to work a regular job, raise a family and start a home business or other work at home job. There’s only so much time in the day and you do have to sleep sometime.

However you get started it’s a big decision, and there will be a lot of difficult decisions and risks to take. But the path is likely to be worth it.

I hear from a lot of people worried about being scammed while looking for a work at home job. It’s tough to know which companies to trust, even when they aren’t asking for money upfront.

If you can stand it, sometimes the best solution is to create your own opportunity. That’s right, start a home business. You’ll have ups and downs with a business, and have to deal with clients who are reluctant to pay you, but at least you’re in charge.

It’s not for everyone, of course. There’s stress involved. It can take a long time to earn anything. But if it’s taking ages to find a legitimate work at home job you really aren’t losing out by starting a business. You might even earn more than you would have from a work at home job.

Here are some that you may want to consider:

Affiliate Marketing

I’m rather fond of this one. Affiliate marketing earns me some pretty good money some months. Lousy income other months. There’s quite a bit of range in there.

There are scams possible in this one, so it’s important to remember that you should never pay to become an affiliate. The merchant should be making their profit off selling to the customers you refer to them, not from you.

One of the keys to succeeding as an affiliate is finding an interesting niche, nothing too broad at least for your early efforts.

SiteBuildIt’s Affiliate Masters Course is a free resource on running your own affiliate websites. They’ll walk you through many of the steps you’ll need. It’s still up to you to make it work.

Errand Running Service

If you don’t mind being out and about a lot, running other people’s errands can be a good business. You can focus on helping out the elderly, people whose jobs keep them too busy to run their own errands, that kind of thing.

Virtual Assistant

This is a popular choice if you’ve been looking at all the data entry and customer service positions, although it’s not exactly the same thing. You may be doing some of those jobs as a virtual assistant, but if you have the skills you could also be working on a website, managing ads, writing and submitting articles, answering emails and so forth.

Writer

Another popular choice. There are plenty of freelance opportunities for writers. A lot of them don’t pay a lot, but as you get experience you can do better. You might be writing website copy, articles for websites, articles for magazines and so forth.

Blogging

Just another form of being a writer in many ways, but you can do it on your own. If you want to make a business of blogging, I strongly recommend getting a domain name and paid hosting rather than going with the free stuff. It looks better as you grow. Blogging to the Bank is one resource to help you learn how to make blogging pay off.

Other Home Businesses

There are tons of other home business ideas out there. The one thing I can promise you about them is that there are no guarantees. More home businesses will fail than succeed. That’s just life.

Have you ever wondered what some of the more common phrases in work at home ads really mean? If you took most of them literally, you’d expect the entire world to be rich, just from the sheer lack of effort made in various home businesses.

Here are some common phrases and their probable true meanings… or at least my own interpretation of them.

No selling required!

It’s not selling if you just tell everyone you meet that it’s a great product, right? Your family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, random people you meet on the street, kids, neighbor’s dog and so forth should be grateful that you take the time to tell them about these wonderful products. They will beat a path to your door if you do so.

No experience required

That’s right, no experience required, and you’re not going to get much in the way of experience here. Unless you count the life experience of losing money to a scam. That’s worth something, right?

Free money making website

Free website that we sell to all our suckers… err, members. Hope you don’t mind that it looks like every other member’s website.

Earn money in your sleep

Not going to happen until you’ve put in a ton of effort. You might even lose some sleep over it.

Free trial

Just give us your credit card information. Your trial will be up before you get the information you’re asking for in the mail. E-mail isn’t good enough for our information.

Get paid to type

All you have to do is type in ads to convince other people to fall for the same scam! It’s easy and you deserve to make the money you lost to us back somehow right? Bueller? Bueller?

Act now! Only x y slots open!

We don’t care that we can allow as many people as we want to download our electronic product. Matter of fact, we’ve done that already. But if you think we’re limiting our sales you might forget to do your due diligence. So hurry up, will ya?

Earn money on autopilot

Rather like earning money while you sleep. It can happen, but it’s not going to be as fast or as easy for most people as the ad claims… and it might not happen at all.

(Google) (Twitter) (other popular site) will pay you $x,xxx per month!

If you follow our instructions, you might manage to waste a lot of time, lose some money advertising, not to mention paying us, and have next to nothing for it. Sometimes we don’t even know who we’re pretending will be paying you. We trust you not to notice the mixups.

As seen on…

We bought an ad there once. We’re not exactly welcome back.

The decision to work at home is one I’ve never regretted. It’s challenging, exhausting, takes up pretty much all of my spare time plus any other time I can give it, but it’s still a great experience.

I have to admit, though, the ups and downs can be pretty rough. Especially the financial ups and downs. But it’s all part of the game.

Dealing with the Financial Ups and Downs

I must say, the financial ups of working at home, and particularly of running a home business have been pretty amazing for me. I don’t just mean not paying for daycare, which would be a pretty big expense with 3 kids.

I mean the months where I get really good commission checks. Bringing in a really healthy check (by my standards) feels great.

On the other hand, those months where it seems like I can’t earn a decent check no matter what I do really suck.

That’s something you’ll face in most home businesses and many work at home jobs. It’s a reality.

Demand for your business goes up. Demand goes down. Competition comes. Competition goes.

For work at home jobs, sometimes there’s tons of work to be had. Other times things are just quiet. That was true even when I was a medical transcriptionist, and that’s a pretty high demand field.

If you aren’t ready for the financial ups and downs (especially the downs), working at home in any capacity is going to be pretty hard on you and your family.

Dealing with the ups is pretty easy. Just don’t overspend in the good times. You need money ready for those times when things aren’t so good.

Dealing with the downs is harder, especially if you haven’t prepared well for them. It’s easier if you have enough money to get by for a few months despite a low income.

But even with that, it’s going to be rough emotionally.

Dealing with the Emotional Ups and Downs

How you feel about working at home in part echoes how your income goes, but not entirely. You can get frustrated even when your income is great, and you can feel great about the work you’re doing even when it’s not yet bringing in any real money.

This is where you need family support. When things just aren’t running smoothly, you don’t want to hear “I told you so” from anyone. You want and need support.

Family’s the best place to get it, but you can also get great support from online friends. Just don’t let it lead into so much goofing off online that you don’t get any work done.

You can share your problems in your favorite forums. You can tweet about them, share with your Facebook friends, whatever and wherever you like to do to vent your frustrations.

Just don’t forget to share your triumphs too.

Enjoy the Ride

Working at home can be a roller coaster in so many ways, but you can’t let it get to you too much. Enjoy the good, deal with the bad and don’t give up. Believe in your ability to make it work, and eventually you will.

I posted last week on how many people set their sights too low when working at home. There’s a flip side to challenging yourself, of course, and that’s working too much.

This is a mistake you can make even if you haven’t set very high goals for yourself, and what defines it is quite vague. It much depends on you and the needs of your family.

Sometimes a particular schedule is just right, but then circumstances change just a little bit, and the schedule is overworking you.

This is something I’ve dealt with quite a bit lately. Having a new baby, moving, getting settled, taking my son to speech therapy, figuring out if we can manage preschool classes for him, taking my daughter to and from school… it all adds up and really makes for a more challenging schedule for me to work.

And so I work fewer hours on my business than I’d like because my family has a lot of needs right now.

I’m much prone to overworking, and I know it. I’ll stay up late even when I know the baby hasn’t been sleeping well and I’ll just be dragging the next day. It’s not the best of habits, really.

It doesn’t feel like overwork; I enjoy what I’m doing. But when I’m that tired later on, I know.

So how do you balance your ambitions with working an appropriate amount?

It’s not always easy. You need to pay attention to your own needs as well as the needs of your family. You don’t ever want to forget why you’re a work at home parent.

Make sure you take some time every day with your family. Eat meals together whenever possible. Play as a family before putting the kids to bed. Take a break with your spouse.

Sometimes, yes, you’ll overwork yourself by working more after doing all the fun stuff. That’s how it goes at times. Just don’t let overwork be your entire way of life.

Like many people, my big reason for starting to work at home in the first place was to be there for my kids. With three of them now, that reason only gets more important.

But I have to admit, dealing with a baby when I want to get work done is not easy. It’s been really tough lately to come up with enough hours to get even the minimum amount of work done I’d like to. Especially as she gets older, more mobile and more demanding.

Time was when I could sit her on my lap and still get a little bit done. That’s not quite so simple now. She’s bigger and much more interested in my keyboard and anything she can reach on my desk. Especially if it can go in her mouth.

Yeah. I pretty much need her naptimes to get anything done. And it’s still not easy many days then, as she’s not exactly a champion of sleeping through the night. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive to work that tired.

This is one of the times that it takes incredible dedication to keep going. Believe me, it would be much easier to just take off, but that’s not what I’m going to do, and if you’re in a similar situation, not what I’d recommend either.

When daytime naptimes don’t work for me, working at night after all the kids are in bed can. Other work at home parents prefer early, early mornings, a thought which gives me the chills. Really, really not for me!

But you do what works for you.

Work early in the morning. Late at night. During baby’s nap. When there’s another adult available to watch the kids.

You can even hire a “Mother’s (or Father’s) Helper” to just play with the baby as you work. I did this when I was a medical transcriptionist, and it was pretty helpful. You don’t even need your helper able to feed the baby or change diapers. Just play with the baby and let you know when something more is needed. Older siblings (where available) can also help.

I like to remind myself that this won’t last forever. That means enjoying this time with a baby and not letting it get me down too much just for being tired. And if the price for not losing a post to a baby pounding a keyboard is a little less sleep, so be it.

One of the challenges of being a work at home parent is setting your work hours. There’s a lot to balance when you have a family. You need to be there for them, but you may need to work more hours than can easily be had in the early morning or at night.

That’s not to say those aren’t appropriate work hours if you like them. I know I prefer to work at night, with the kids in bed and my husband off playing on his computer. I’ll sometimes take some time off to watch television with him, but mostly I try to be productive.

A lot of figuring out appropriate work hours is a matter of personal preference combined with family needs. If you love having your evenings open, you’re going to have to pick some other time to work.

But if you need to get a project DONE, you may have to add in some hours and lose some of the time you’d rather keep available for other purposes.

Working at home does often mean sacrificing some family time, and that’s a reality you have to deal with. It happens even if you don’t have clients and work entirely on a schedule of your own choosing. There will come times when you just really need to get something done on a tighter schedule than you might like.

My mother asked me a question the other day that I hadn’t given much thought to in a very long time. Would I be going back to work outside the home when Selene goes to kindergarten?

Umm, well, that’s pretty far in the future. She’s only 7 months old, after all.

Now, my mother is very supportive of me being at home. This is not a topic she’s nagged me on or anything. I know a lot of work at home and stay at home moms do have problems with that, but I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to deal with that so much.

And as it is something a lot of work at home moms do, it’s even a fair question when posed politely.

My first reflex is to say “Heck no!”

Possibly more colorfully than that if someone were to be rude about it, but as I said, that was not a part of the issue.

Besides, while I like to think of it as improbable, nothing is impossible. And if my family need the money, yes I would.

But I don’t think about it because I don’t often miss working outside the home. I can miss the social side of it, interacting face to face with other adults, eating out and that kind of thing. Overall, however, I most decidedly do not.

It’s not a bad thing if you do miss working outside the home. Working at home is not the dream for all mothers or fathers. For many it’s frankly more difficult to work at home than outside the home. Being at home can be a sacrifice in many ways, not just financially.

I love being my own boss, even when I’m being hard on myself for not working enough hours. I love it even when the money isn’t coming in as I’d like. I’m even fairly fond of it when I have to work extra long hours to get something done that just can’t wait.

It’s hard often enough. There’s really not so much a possibility for a break with children around. If I’m not working on business, I’m probably dealing with children. Playing with them is a delight, but it’s not exactly the same thing as taking a full on break where I can do just as I please.

For me, the parts I miss about working outside the home do not come out ahead of the parts I love about working at home. And so, no matter the age of my kids I intend to keep on fighting to earn enough to stay here.

I’ve been in contact with Jessica LaFlesch from Arise lately. She gave me some customer service work at home job leads to post and mentioned that a lot of people have misconceptions about the relationship between Arise and people who work with them. She graciously agreed to answer some questions, so as to help put these misconceptions to rest.

1. What kinds of jobs does Arise generally hire for?

We do not hire agents; rather we contact with them and provide opportunities with specific clients to certify on and begin working. Arise has over forty clients in three primary categories: Sales, Customer Service and Tech Support. While the majority of our client needs involve handling inbound calls, we do have some clients who use Arise Certified Professionals to answer incoming emails and incoming chat sessions.

2. What is the relationship between work at home agents and Arise?

The Arise business model is built on a business to business relationship. Essentially, Arise Certified Professionals (ACPs) are considered self employed, contacted with Arise under the business entity established within the Admissions process. ACPs are able to pick the clients to certify on and build their own schedules in half hour increments based on their schedules.

3. What costs are there to work for Arise?

ACPs are considered independent contactors, not employees. As with starting ANY business, there are is an initial investment. However, much of the investment is not paid to Arise, it is invested in things like establishing your business entity with the state and your workstation. I have included a breakdown of the initial investment:

• Background Check – $13 or $26 (Paid to US Information Search)

• ACP101 Basic Certification Course – $99

• Incorporation – $100 +/- (Paid to the state you are filing in)

• High Speed ISP – $100 +/- (Paid to the vendor of your choice)

• Phone Equipment & Dedicated Line – $185 +/- (Paid to the vendor of your choice)

• Client Specific Certification Course $50 – $225

Arise does charge for certification courses. The fee assessed helps Arise to offset the cost associated with facilitating the courses.

4. What misconceptions about Arise would you like to clear up?

The below are excerpts from actual inquiries I have received.

1. “With Arise, you are paying for a job.”

The biggest misconception about Arise is that candidates are “paying for a job”. This simply is not the case. Arise Certified Professionals are independent, self employed individuals who are able to pick their own hours as well as the client they would like to certify with. They are also able to reap the tax and other benefits only available to small business owners.

2. “Nobody told me there was an investment required.”

Arise makes no secret of our business model or the initial investment – this information is located within our FAQs (no login or profile required), however not every candidate takes the time to review these pages before starting the Admissions process.

3. “I heard there are not enough hours.”

As with any type of contact center – virtual or traditional – there will be peaks and valleys in the call volume for each client. As a decrease occurs, there may be a reduction in the number of hours available. Successful ACPs will hold more than one certification to offset this.

4. “Arise brings on new agents while terminating the contacts of good existing agents for no reason.”

Arise will *not* terminate the VSC Statements of Work (SOW / contract) without cause. It is imperative that every ACP know and understand the expectations of the client before they even begin the certification course. Arise is no different than any other type of company – work at home or otherwise- agents must be meeting or exceeding the established expectations or they face the possibility of having their VSC SOW terminated.

The Arise Admissions process is typically open year round to new profiles, however, there are times of year when the demand for additional agents is larger than others. As a client advises their needs have changed and more agents are required, Arise will schedule and facilitate additional certification courses. During slower times of year, there may be a longer period of time in between certification opportunities.

I’d like to thank Jessica LaFlasch for answering my questions. If anyone has further questions, just let me know and I can send them along to her.