Not all of the challenges of running a home business relate to the business itself. There’s also the need to keep up with family and the house. It’s a whole lot of work, and it can be exhausting. But it’s common when you’re home all day to feel obligated to handle it all. How can you do it?

Keep Your Family Involved

The first thing to do is to give up on the idea that it’s all your responsibility. If you have a work at home job or a home business, you deserve the same sort of consideration as those who work outside the home. Get everyone else in the house involved at appropriate levels, even if they work outside the home or go to school. Anyone who is physically capable of helping should have appropriate responsibilities around the house.

Make sure you count responsibilities both inside the house and outside. Mowing the lawn is just as much a part of keeping the family home going as cleaning the kitchen. Divide things up to balance personal preferences and how much each person is having to do aside from housework, such as holding down a job or going to school.

Don’t Let Messes Get a Head Start

One of the easiest ways to keep your home from being a mess is to avoid the mess in the first place. Clean up the mess of cooking as you go as much as possible. Have the kids pick up their toys as soon as they’re done with them. Get rid of clutter.

Do a Little Cleaning Every Day

For those little chores that add up to so much, keep up by doing a little bit every day. Do the sweeping and mopping, the dusting or the vacuuming. If you don’t have to do them all at once, they don’t feel quite so overwhelming.

It’s really amazing what you can get done in 15 minutes if you don’t let the messes get too far ahead. It makes doing small amounts of other types of cleaning each day practical.

Pick the Right Time for the Big Chores

Don’t let the big chores get in the way of what you need to do for your home business. Plan things out so you can handle the big cleaning projects, the laundry and so forth when they won’t keep you from having a productive day of work. They have to get done, you’re home, but do they have to be done right now or can they wait for a more convenient time?

Your house can deal with being a bit messy for a time if you have more important priorities, especially if your family relies on the income from your work. Don’t let cleaning get in the way of earning the income you need.

With the new year approaching, many people like to review how things have been going and make resolutions or set goals for how their business will go in the new year. It’s as good a time as any to do this; in fact, reviewing your progress and setting new goals is best done a few times a year in my opinion. You need to be aware of how things are going to make sure you’re on the right path.

I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. This past year did not go as well as I wanted it to, but some things I’ve been working on are showing signs of life. I’ve had plenty of incredibly frustrating times where my income hasn’t been remotely where I want it to be, and times when getting enough work done has been next to impossible. All I can do is keep plugging along.

There have been changes in how I run things. I won a laptop earlier in the year, and that has been a big help in getting time to work. On the other hand, I’ve been homeschooling my oldest daughter since August, and that takes a lot of work time away. Things get pretty hectic at times.

These changes effect my productivity goals. The laptop gives me flexibility, the homeschooling limits my time available during the week.

You have to adjust your goals when things like this happen. It may not be only your business goals that change, however. I also changed my expectations around the house, and learned to ask for more help in keeping the house clean. I ask for more quiet work time on the weekends, while trying to not neglect family time. It’s a doozy of a balance much of the time.

Keep Goals Realistic

Your work goals must be realistic. Goals that you’ll never reach are only so motivating. Lesser goals that take you in the direction of your greater goals are necessary so you know you’re making progress. You may have a goal of becoming a millionaire, for example, but what are the intermediate steps. If you don’t have realistic goals that take you in that direction, eventually you will get tired of that goal and give up.

Let’s start with something simple, say, earning $5000 a month from your home business. It’s not an excessive goal, but it’s one many of us would love to reach.

Depending on where you’re at, that may be too distant a goal or it may be a perfectly reasonable one. For this example, I’ll treat it as a distant goal, something for someone new to running a home business might be dealing with. Most of us aren’t going to hit that goal quickly – in fact, most home businesses earn much less. You need goals you can achieve so you can really feel your progress.

There are many goals you can set that will help you to know that you’re making progress toward that $5000 a month goal. They aren’t all financial, although having a goal of even $100 a month to start isn’t a bad beginning if you’re still at $0 a month. Here are some goals to consider:

• Website traffic goals: How much traffic would you like to generate? Keep it simple at first, then increase. You may also want to measure this goal by increases, such as increasing your website traffic by 10%, 25%, etc.
• Talking to people: If you’re more oriented toward talking to people, set a goal for how many people you will talk to about your business. Just don’t get obnoxious about it with your family, friends or people you meet on the street. It’s a great way to become unpopular. You want to pay attention to signals that a person is or is not interested in your opportunity.
• Writing goals: If you do a lot of writing for your business, set a daily writing goal. Don’t go for pure quantity, make sure there’s some quality in there too. Quality takes longer, but it should benefit your business for a longer time than mass produced dreck will.
• Lead generation: Set a goal for the number of leads you’re generating. As you meet each goal with this one, plan an increase for the next goal. If you’re starting out, even your first lead may be something to celebrate.
• Research goals: What do you need to learn to run your business better? Set a goal to learn and apply that new skill. Learning about a new skill is nothing if you never apply it. Don’t set a new goal in this area until you’re actually using the information or have consciously decided that the new information or skill is not something you want to apply to your home business.
• Social media goals: Don’t make this be just about how many friends or followers you have. Consider your interaction with them as well. You may do well to set goals on how often you reply to other people on social media sites, so long as you keep it real. Social media is great for marketing, but it works best if you’re a real person to the other people on there. Using social media well for business can be a combination of marketing and being a real person, at least if you’re a small or one person business.

As you can see, none of these on their own is about earning $5000. However, they may help you get on the right path toward that more difficult goal.

Analyze Your Efforts

Whether you reach your goals or not, you should be analyzing what went right and what went wrong. This will help you keep from making the same mistakes over and over again.

You may find, for example that in doing your research you tend to skip the step of applying the new things you’ve learned. That’s a lot of time and very possibly money wasted. It’s a very common issue for people running any sort of online business.

You need to figure out why you aren’t applying things you’ve learned to your business. Are you too quickly attracted to bright and shiny product launches? Do you always think they’re too hard to do? Are you really trying to learn the right skill sets for what you’re willing to work on?

Once you know your mistakes you have a better chance of not making that same mistake in the future. That improves your chance of success.

Sometimes things will be beyond your immediate control. You may fail to generate the traffic you hoped to gain because your site fell in the search engine rankings for your best keyword. You can work on that problem once it’s noticed, but it may take time to fix. Knowing where the fall happened will help you figure out what to do about it.

Even when you aren’t reaching your goals as quickly as you’d hoped, it’s vital that you set some sort of reachable goal. It’s one of the things that can motivate you to keep working on what is probably a very challenging business.

I’ve often found defining a productive day with my business a bit challenging. A few years ago, I could write seven articles in one day, and that was what counted as a productive day. These days, it’s rare for me to write more than four, maybe five if I have very few distractions that day. Other days I struggle to write even one complete article.

I felt bad about that for a while. I know I have more distractions than I used to, in particular a sweet young toddler who is very good at getting into the middle of things, but I still felt as though I should be doing more.

I gave it some thought, though, and realized that I don’t need to feel bad about it. It’s not that I’m slower with my writing. It’s that I’m more careful about it.

When I wrote more articles, they were less informative. That’s not always a bad thing, as some of them were pretty fun to write, but many of them didn’t serve much of a purpose. They didn’t take much thought on my part, and so didn’t give much to think about to my readers.

I came to understand that it’s not all about quantity. Quality matters too.

Quantity Has Advantages

I’m not saying that producing a large quantity of articles a bad thing for all websites. If you’re trying to be informative it’s usually not the best thing, as you probably aren’t really digging into your topics.

Quantity is much more popular for low quality websites. That’s why so many people love article spinners. They can write one article and come up with dozens or hundreds of variations on that article. They may not all make sense, depending on the quality of the spinner, but that’s not their main goal. They just want to produce a ton of articles.

It’s ugly, but it can work for driving ad clicks and affiliate sales.

The Advantages of Quality

Fewer but higher quality articles has advantages if you’re looking to build a longer term relationship with readers. If you want a reputation as a good resource in whatever niche you’re working in, you need to provide quality. That’s probably going to cut down on the volume of articles you write.

Quality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all 1000+ word articles. You can provide solid information in a much smaller space. Quality simply means you’re focused on providing a good resource, no matter how many words you use to create it.

Quality can come quickly when you’re writing about something you know well. It doesn’t hurt to do research even on topics you know well. Something you might not have thought of on your own can come up.

There’s a good read over on Daily Blog Tips called You’ll Never Get Everything Done, and That’s Ok which points out that no matter how hard you work, you’re never going to get everything done for your business. I quite enjoyed that post because I was already thinking on this article, and several of the points made really resonated with my thoughts for this article.

It’s not always easy to make sales when you focus on quality. You have to balance providing quality information with earning a living, if earning money is your goal.

On the plus side, when you build visitor trust through providing quality information, and then recommend a product, you’re well trusted by your visitors. That helps with sales.

What’s Productive?

These days I consider a productive day to be one in which I spent a good amount of time working on my business and using the time well. It may not always show in terms of articles written or pages updated, but I will know what I’ve gotten it done.

You can’t get it all done. It doesn’t matter if you’re focused on quality or quantity. There’s always more to do, and more you wish you could do.

You can be more productive and feel better about what you get done if you prioritize your work. Get the things done first that will most benefit your business. You can switch that out sometimes to the parts you enjoy most, but make your focus the things that will help to grow your online business.

Get your priorities taken care of, and you’ll feel better about whatever else you accomplish during the day. Leave your priorities undone, and they’ll keep hanging over your head and leaving you feeling as though you haven’t accomplished enough.

Mental Blocks

Some days you’re going to have a mental block on the things you want to prioritize. Some days writing isn’t going to work out for you no matter how hard you try to come up with ideas. Some days link building isn’t going to work out for you.

If you’re dealing with a block on these things, find something else to work on for a time. If you can come back to your priorities later in the day, so much the better. The point is to not let a mental block keep you from being productive at all. Find something you can accomplish.

No matter how your days go on the whole, be proud of what you do accomplish. Running any sort of business at home is challenging with all of the distractions. You’re accomplishing more than many other people do just by working at it, and potentially building a business that will improve your family’s lifestyle.

Keeping up with all you have to do is not easy for a stay at home or work at home mom. No matter what you do, something will come up to use up all of your spare time. But if you’re online a lot anyhow, these tools can help to simplify your life.

Food and Fitness

FitDay

The free online version allows you to keep track of your daily food intake and exercise. You can buy a version for your PC with more features, but I would say try the free first to see if it’s generally what you want.

Meals Matter

A free tool to help you plan healthy meals. Offers tools to help you make shopping lists as well as figure out the meals you’re going to make.

AllRecipes

My favorite recipe site, mostly due to the user ratings. If I like a recipe, I print it out and file it in a binder. Much more effective for me than buying a cookbook. I write notes on changes I’ve made so I can keep track easily.

Amazon Grocery Subscription

If the prices are right, buying online can make a lot of sense for groceries you need regularly. You can get free delivery plus a discount if you subscribe to your regular needs. You pick how often you need delivery.

Budgeting

Mvelopes

Mvelopes has a free 30 day trial, but after that has a few membership options. A generally good tool for keeping track of finances, based in many ways on the envelope system of managing your finances.

Pear Budget

Another budgeting tool with a free 30 day trial, then $3 per month. Their goal is to make budgeting simple.

Communication

Skype

Skype has become quite popular as a way to call family members who are far away. The company one of my sisters works for even uses it to keep all their home-based employees in contact. They just stay logged into Skype anytime they’re working, for meetings and so forth. For many uses it’s free, but other features require payment.

Google Talk

A good IM option as well as a way to make computer to computer calls.

Scheduling

Remember the Milk

There’s a great free version that will do for most people. It can remind you of tasks by email, SMS or instant messenger. It even has a gadget to integrate with your GMail account, or it can contact you through Twitter.

Google Calendar

Yes, I enjoy a lot of Google’s free products. Google Calendar lets me input all kinds of important events, from birthdays repeating every year, to one time events. Then it can be set to email me and anyone else I choose in advance as a reminder. I’m terrible with birthdays, so I like setting reminders to about two weeks in advance. Makes me look like the organized one in the family.

Events can be set to public or private, so I can keep things to myself while sharing things that I want others to know.

Free Goal Setting

A simple tool that emails you weekly with reminders of the goals you set. Just for managing one goal, but I would imagine you could set up multiple if you chose.

Kids Online

KidZui

A browser for kids with some social aspects. Lots of parental controls, and they’re up to 1.5 million approved items for kids to view. They don’t use filters; this system goes strictly by what has been approved.

You can pay to get more features, such as being able to view your child’s history as far back as you like, and more options for your child’s avatar.

HandiPoints

A free online chore chart system for kids. They can earn points toward allowance or play time on the site. With the popularity of virtual worlds for kids to play on, this looks like a great way to keep control over the time spent online and encourage the kids to get their chores done.

I think one of the hardest things for me with this pregnancy has been rescheduling my work times to cope with the fact that sometimes I just get more tired.

At that I’m lucky. If I worked outside the home I’d just have to cope or call in sick. I do love my flexibility in work times!

This past weekend’s trip was one of those occasions where I had to think about what I wanted to do not only by, well, what I wanted to do, but also what I was really up for doing. Combine attending BlogWorld Expo with being 5 months pregnant and dealing with severe hip pain, and you really do start to think of excuses to just sit down.

Which makes it really hard to network until you get to a table full of people you can talk to. But it’s really good for attending sessions.

I was just glad to only be 5 months along. Another month or two, and I very much doubt I would have risked it. I came too close to losing my son late in my previous pregnancy to take chances.

Of course everyone has their own priorities. You just have to look at the controversy surrounding what Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin did. I’m not using that as a criteria for whether or not I think she’s qualified, but she certainly opened up a big debate on what mothers should be doing so late in a pregnancy. I wouldn’t have. She did. It turned out all right for her.

And that’s enough politics for now. I just found the discussion on motherhood that opened up interesting.

As with so many things in life, it comes down to your own tolerance levels. Those of us who chose to stay at home to raise our children have different priorities than the ones who choose to work outside the home. And different from those who work outside the home out of sheer necessity.

What I don’t do and I don’t recommend doing, is letting pregnancy take complete control of your life… unless you’re on bedrest or something. There are times to push your limits and times to take it easy.

As for me, I’m trying hard to get a lot of things done. I have serious goals to consider, such as building my income to be prepared in case this miserable economy does in my husband’s nice, new job. It might.

But I’ve been taking advantage and sleeping in as much as my son will allow. Changing how much and at what time of day I read other blogs so that I can get work of my own done. And trying to get my husband to understand that walking a lot build up hip pain much faster than it builds up endurance, which he thinks I should be trying. I don’t think he understands that it’s not a muscle issue.

I know these next few months will bring more changes to how I work, and after baby girl comes around, it will change more yet. Little rascal will no doubt make life interesting in yet another new way.

They always do.