Distractions Faced by Work-at-Home Moms

I decided to talk about distraction today as it is one of many productivity killers. One of the definitions given by Dictionary.com for distractions is "that which divides the attention, or prevents concentration".

So what are some of the distractions faced by a work at home mom?

House chores
These form some of the day-to-day activities in the home anyway, but as a work at home mom, it becomes a distraction when the chores are done at a time when work
pertaining to the business should be done.

Sometimes it could be hard to distance oneself from house work because it is there in front of you, but without allocating time for house work and business, it may be difficult to get things done on time or done at all.


E-mails
This is an area where I'm trying to discipline myself. Having set times to check one's e-mail is a way of avoiding distractions. Checking one's e-mail every now and
again without any set time, could lead one to respond to e-mails that could be done at a later time or even get carried away with an irrelevant mail that adds little or no value to what you are working on at the moment.


Social Media
Facebook, twitter and other social media avenues are very good ways to gain visibility and promotion for one's business. There are however times when this can become a distraction when that is all that person seems to be doing. Social media is just one aspect of building one's business and therefore attention needs to be given to other areas as well.


TV
Unless one is disciplined with regards to watching TV, this could be a distraction especially if you don't have a room set up specifically for your business. Modern
technology now gives us an opportunity to record TV programs. Why not record your favorite program and watch when you are giving yourself a break.


Telephone Calls
Telephone calls become a distraction when they have nothing to do with your business during working hours. As a work at home mom, you may have friends and relatives who do not really understand the concept of working from home and may be on the phone wanting to chat. There are two things that you may do here - either put the phone on silent and let them leave a message or let them know the time you will be able to take calls.


In addition to the above there could be other distractions which we don't have control over such as attending to the children. I hate to use the word distractions for children, but if one is going by the dictionary definition then that is the word that qualifies it. You may be in the middle of writing a blog post and your child needs you - you have no choice than to leave what you are doing and attend to them. Afterall the reason why you became a work at home mom was to be able to attend to your children and buisness in the comfort of your home.

What distractions have you been able to overcome or avoid?

How Do You Invest Your Time?

I'm going back to basics a bit today. I shall be talking about time.

We all have 24 hours in a day and how the hours are managed by each individual is up to them. The thing about time is that it cannot be saved or accumulated in
comparison to other things like money. We can both save and borrow money, but we cannot do this with time. Once the time we have for the day has gone, that it is - we have to wait for another day to use the time that is available in it.

I read something interesting about the average hours we spend doing one thing or the other in the week:-

56 hours sleeping
50 hours at work (which includes the commute)
24 hours eating (you may add the time spent visiting the toilet to this)

As we have 168 hours in any given week, after subtracting the above, that leaves us with 38 hours and for each day of the week we have approximately 5 extra hours to spare.

What we do with the 5 hours could make a difference between living a productive or unproductive life. If we are able to analyse how we spend the 5 extra hours each
day; perhaps that would help us to manage our time better.

It is amazing how easy it is to discover where the hours have gone when we take an inventory of how our day was spent. If you do this for a week or two, you would probably be able determine what measures to take to make for positive adjustments.

I was speaking to a teenager the other day and she told me how she forgot to do her homework and had to do it on the bus in order not to get into trouble at school. I
then asked what she did when she got home and she said she watched a bit of TV, spoke to mates on the phone and browsed the internet. I then suggested that next time she has homework to do, she should do the homework first before switching on the TV. She would be surprised about how quickly her homework would be completed and then still have time for other things.

This example could be applied in the life of adults as well. Whilst we might be complaining about not having enough time to develop ourselves by reading books or
taking courses; we may not realise that those extra hours are there for us to use. Watching a 2 hour program on TV has already sucked into the 5 hours, you probably
have a few chores to do after that and oh there's the e-mails to check. And the list goes on and on.

Time as we all know, waits for no one - so let's invest it wisely.




Free to use image taken from Morguefile.com

The Challenge Starts Today

I have kind of taken note of some of the things that interest me and that I will be writing about this month and they include the following:-

Blogging
Productivity
Social Media
Squidoo
Community Spirit
Motherhood
Parenting

I'm not so sure whether all the topics listed above are ideal for the one blog, but we'll see.

There are loads of things under blogging that could represent a topic. For example, after learning how to do a task, I could blog about it. I do not know a lot about posting images on blogs. This could represent a topic for one of my posts, so there you go, I have one blog post in the pipeline already!

Productivity is important to me because I need to know how to manage my time effectively in order to spend it wisely to produce good quality work. Eliminating all forms of distractions is equally important and could also form a topic(s) for one of my blog posts.

The effective use of social media in promoting one's blog and business could also be a blog post. Find out the aspects of social media to use. What works for my blog may not necessarily work for the other person's blog. Find out what works for me and stick with it.

I've recently started using Squidoo, so I may post about my experience there.

Community Spirit with other bloggers and how it helps to be in a community. I have some experience of that with squidoo and could also incorporate that.

I'm not too sure about talking about motherhood and parenting in this blog so I would need to check.

I'm determined not to let procrastination get the better part of me. Even as I'm writing this, I'm thinking should I have said that? What if I do procrastinate; then what would people who read the blog think? Well there might be lapses here and there but the most important thing is getting oneself up and continuing - not stopping.

As with anything in life, the topics might change and I might find myself blogging about topics completely different to what I first thought I would write. That's okay as long as I am writing about something tangible and valuable.

The good thing about the challenge is that one is surrounded by a community of other bloggers of different experience levels who will be able to help along the way. So it's not as if I'll be on my own.

I do look forward to the next 30 days and hope to look back as others have done and say it was well worth it.

Free to use image taken from www.morguefile.com