The following post is from Prerna of The Mom Writes:

source: pixabay

Ahh.. the summer! We look forward to it and yet we dread it. We want the season to be filled with fun for the kids, but we also know that we need to get work done in the midst of it all.

How does one juggle everything and stay sane as well?

Here are 5 super-effective ways to cool down the heat this summer for fun and work:

1. Plan NOW.

That’s right. Planning ahead of time will help you be prepared when school is actually out. Jot down a routine that you’d follow. Outline activities to keep the kids busy while you knock off email or other tasks. Talk to other parents for play date swaps. Find a camp close to home for the kids to go to for a few hours every day. Planning now will go a LONG way in saving your sanity then.

2. Focus on essentials.

The slow summer season is NOT the time for you to be worrying about add-on projects or activities that can wait. Focus only on what really needs to be done from a work point-of-view. Everything else can wait. It can. Take a deep breath and tell yourself that.

3. Tackle productivity slumps.

The long, lazy summer days and the kids at home can all put you in a “holiday” mood with your productivity slumping every now and then. Tackling productivity slumps and getting your mojo back will ensure that you bounce back with ease.

4. Get support.

The summer is the perfect time to seek support. The best part is that you don’t have to shell out a lot or sign up for daycare. Think out-of-the box. How about a tween who’s home from school and who’ll be happy to earn a few dollars every week? Or how about a day summer camp where the kids can learn life skills while you knock off work for a few hours? Or how about asking your spouse if he or she can come home early a few days in the week so that you can escape to the coffee shop for work? Yes, you may need to use a combination of support systems to keep things running smoothly. That is why planning right now is so important.

5. Go easy.

Finally, remember that the summer is not going to last forever. School is going to start. Kids will go back to a routine. Your work will pick up. So, for now, go easy on yourself and everyone else. Savor the season and enjoy it.

What tips do YOU have for chilling out this summer as a work-at-home parent? 

	Prerna Malik is a mom, a wife, a writer and woman who believes in being postively productive, parenting with love and creating a home that invites you to put your feet up and relax. Find her sharing her journey and experiences with productivity and parenting at The Mom Writes.

How to Have a Chilled Out Summer Routine & Make Working from Home Easy is a post from Life Your Way

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Learn the secrets of successful bloggers and take your blog to the next level with this week’s ebook collection. From balancing your blog and family and setting boundaries for your online presence to monetizing your blog, writing an ebook of your own and using Pinterest to grow your brand, this bundle is packed full of resources for bloggers. And it’s available for 70% off this week only!

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Even if you’re not interested in this week’s bundle, be sure to sign up for the BundleoftheWeek.com weekly newsletter so you can be the first to know about the latest bundle:

Get a Bundle of 5 Blogging eBooks for $7.40! {BundleoftheWeek.com} is a post from Life Your Way

© 2010-2013 Purple Martin Press, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Work Your Way subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please send an email to contact@yourway.net to let us know. Thanks.

The following post is from Prerna of The Mom Writes:

source: pixabay

My head is often abuzz with ideas. Every book I read sparks a new creative light. Every blog post I go through inspires me to create something. It’s not always work-related. Projects related to the home, crafts to do with my daughter, baking experiments waiting to be tried out. The list is endless and my head becomes a whirlwind of activity.

The thing is that creative surges like these happen all too often and to nearly all of us. With the inflow of a HUGE amount of visual{thank you, Pinterest!} and textual inspiration these days, it is relatively easy to be inspired, motivated and filled with ideas to change our own lives.

However, there are questions that need to be answered so that we actually get something done and don’t lose our mind in the process.

Questions like,

What to do?

Which idea to implement first?

Which area of my life needed the brightest spark right away?

Which idea may not be a “good idea” after all?

Yes, too many ideas is a good problem to have if you know what to do with them. I realized I had to come up with a system to channelize my creative surges and find a way to actually realize at least some of these ideas productively and intentionally.

Here is my 4-step approach to productive thinking when you have too many ideas and honestly, too little time:

1. Have a recording system.

The first thing to do is have some sort of recording system for all those ideas. It can be a simple journal, the Notes app on your smartphone, a fancier tool like, Evernote or Pinterest even. Whatever you do, try not to have too many of your recording systems. For instance, don’t have a journal, a recorder AND Post-Its. If you have to have multiple systems, choose TWO and stick to them.

The idea is that you have someplace to record all those flashes of inspiration so that you have them in ONE handy place to review. {see next step}

2. Review your idea file weekly and monthly.

Every week, spend some time reviewing each idea and sorting it into categories – life, kids, work, home, husband, relationships. I like to keep the categories broad so I have Self, Home, Family, Business. You can create a system that works well for you and your needs.

I also recommend reviewing the file monthly to see which of those ideas you may have already implemented without even realizing it. For instance, one of the ideas I had sometime last month was to create a monthly summer activity calendar for my 5-year old with links to posts that had the craft ideas. I started a simple Word document on my laptop and kept plugging in links I found interesting. When I did my monthly review, I realized I’d already actioned the idea and just crossed it off.

A monthly review is also a good time for a quality audit, which is our next step.

3. Run a quality audit…objectively.

When you’re doing your monthly review of the Ideas file, sort through the ideas and objectively see which ones are the real diamonds-in-the-rough and which ones are well, too rough to be anything. Now this exercise does depend upon the season of your life.

However, there are some basic guidelines that I follow:

• Will implementing this idea improve the quality of my life/family/business?
• Will actioning this idea give me immense joy/happiness/money?
• Will the idea have a good return on investment or ROI in terms of effort investment vs experience?
• Do I REALLY, like truly, madly, deeply want to do this?

If I answer “yes” to at least 2 out of the 4 questions, I let the idea simmer awhile longer in the file, else I cross it off and move on.

4. Create an action plan and act on it.

My final step and probably the most crucial one to dealing with too many ideas is to create an action plan for the real gems and then, work it. My process is to pick at least ONE idea each month for all 4 categories.  But we all know life as a mom and entrepreneur. Nothing predictable. Some months, it may be just ONE idea in all. Some months, none. Yes, it happens.

BUT once I create the action plan, I focus on working it and bringing that idea to life.

Like I said earlier, not every idea needs this step and some may get actioned without a plan. That is good but having a system in place to be more productive about what I work on and how I do it is always a blessing.

What do YOU think is the challenge of having too many ideas?

	Prerna Malik is a mom, a wife, a writer and woman who believes in being postively productive, parenting with love and creating a home that invites you to put your feet up and relax. Find her sharing her journey and experiences with productivity and parenting at The Mom Writes.

Productive Thinking: What to Do with All Those Ideas in Your Head is a post from Life Your Way

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This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of American Osteopathic Association for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Even though I work at home, the thing I have in common with the majority of office workers is pain from working on the computer all the time. The truth is I don’t have the best posture anyway, and years of working on a laptop while sitting on the couch or on my bed have made it worse and led to chronic back and shoulder pain, as well as tension headache.

I keep thinking  I need to do something differently — focus on proper posture, sit in a better seat, get up and stretch more often — but I’m not great at any of those, and I have been putting off making actual changes.

Because chronic pain affects more than 100 million Americans, the American Osteopathic Association is currently running a Break Through Your Pain campaign to help office workers in America discover the cause of their pain as well as ways to heal and prevent it.

If you’re experiencing office worker-itis like me, visit the site for:

• “At Your Desk” Makeover Tips (like keeping your feet flat on the floor)
• Five Habits to Stop and Five Habits to Start
• A Break Through Your Pain Pledge to Yourself
• Tips for Talking to Your Physician About Your Pain
• Living with Pain? Quiz

Do your friends a favor and share the above infograph on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest so they can find relief as well!

If you’re living with chronic pain, I’d love to hear from you as well. Share your personal story and tell us what you’re doing to overcome it!

Is Back & Neck Pain Just Part of Working at the Computer? is a post from Life Your Way

© 2010-2013 Purple Martin Press, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Work Your Way subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please send an email to contact@yourway.net to let us know. Thanks.

The following post is from Prerna of The Mom Writes:

source: blakespot

When I started out with my social media and web content business many moons ago, I was determined to bootstrap it and not dip into our savings for anything. So, not only was I the chief content writer and head social media manager, I was also chief everything else- designer, bookkeeper, fire extinguisher and my go-to guide for everything was Google.

Since then, I’ve had the blessing of my husband join me and take on a lot of my additional workload but even then, with business growing, I’m having to spend more and more time on client projects, consulting and coaching and not as much time with my family.  It’s a vicious circle really. We need the money since it is our primary source of income to give our family the life we want.  ~sigh~

Any way, so I recently sat down and plugged EVERYTHING I did into a nifty time-and-money calculator that my husband had designed for me.

It was an eye-opening exercise to see how my time-consuming tasks {think uploading posts, replying to emails, PR, etc} weren’t really bringing in the money.

It was time to make my time count. {See what I did there!}

Here’s how I worked out how to make the MOST of the time I spend on my business:

 Fix the “unprofitables”.

The first thing I learned from my time and money  exercise was that I had been spending way too much unprofitable time on activities that were NOT my core focus areas. I specialize in writing and social media management and that is what brings in the butter for our bread. Replying to emails is something that a virtual assistant can easily and responsibly handle for me as well as helping me with managing my PR and outreach efforts.

What is YOUR core work responsibility? Will doing more of that and outsourcing the unprofitables give you the extra income and freedom of time that you need?

Say “No.”

I keep repeating this but saying “no” is so liberating. I have a no-do list for my personal life and now I have one for work. Assignments that I wouldn’t take, things I wouldn’t do- Skype calls that can easily be sorted out over email or in-person meetings that can be done over Skype and so on.

What can YOU say “No” to at work?

Evaluate every now and then.

Evaluating your current situation is key to making your time really count. For instance, I am ALL for bootstrapping and being a DIY-er, but when I was starting out, it was okay. I didn’t have the resources or even the wisdom to invest where needed. Now, if I want my business to grow AND for me to spend more time with my daughter and husband, I need to evaluate what I can hire out and how much time would that save me without impacting my income.

Download the free time-and-money project calculator and plug in your numbers for at least one month and see what can YOU do away with without it impacting how much you earn.

Keep your vision intact.

Seriously, you’d be amazed at how things get when business starts to grow. If you really want to make your time count, think about the WHY behind your journey and then take the action you need to realize it. For me, it was recalling that I wanted to work-from-home to be there for my daughter and if now all I was doing is working, I might as well go to an office, right? SO, write it down if you have to but keep your vision intact and base your decisions on that.

What is YOUR vision? What is YOUR story for working from home? How do YOU think you can make your time as a work-at-home parent count? Yes, we can all learn from each other, so do share!

	Prerna Malik is a mom, a wife, a writer and woman who believes in being postively productive, parenting with love and creating a home that invites you to put your feet up and relax. Find her sharing her journey and experiences with productivity and parenting at The Mom Writes.

How to Make Your Work-at-Home Time Really Count is a post from Life Your Way

© 2010-2013 Purple Martin Press, LLC | All rights reserved - This feed is provided for the convenience of Work Your Way subscribers. Any reproduction of the content within this feed is strictly prohibited. If you are reading this content elsewhere, please send an email to contact@yourway.net to let us know. Thanks.