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4 Ways To Be Productive as A Mom Working from Home

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Working from home is NOT glamours like you see in the movies…

Most think that working from home is a luxury. You get to wake up when you want, work in your PJ’s, no commute, no traffic, no money spent on gas, lunch money saved, and you get naptime as if you were in preschool. Those things I have learned easily become your curse instead of your blessing.

I am a mother of 2 and I work my business from home. My 6-month-old son stays home with me full time so I have to work and be a mom to him at the same damn time. I get so many messages on how I balance my two lives and make it look easy.   I came up with four simple tips that help me stay productive since I am working from home.

 1. Get dressed  as if  you have a 9-5

Working in your PJ’s the first week you work from home is life but after that high is over, you develop a pattern of always working in your PJ’s. You become unproductive and lazy because you have not fully prepared yourself. It is so true that when you look good, you feel good which makes you perform better. Stop working in your PJ’s and get dressed all up like you have a job to go too because you do. It just so happens to be your own business that you work from home.

I comb my hair, I beat this face, I wear cute clothes, and I get all dolled up to go to work. You don’t work from home, you work from the office that just so happens to be in your home. Change your mindset.

I wake up 30 minutes earlier than my children so I can get myself ready. At 8:30 am when I drop my 5-year-old off at kindergarten, I am cute in my office with my laptop and coffee ready to start my job at 9:00 am.

2. Create a top 3 to-do list

Life happens but life really happens when you work from home with children. I can’t control if my 6-month-old wants to be a whiny brat all day and all he wants to do is be held and cuddle. So, I come up with my top 3 things that I MUST get done that day.   I have my day planned by the hour but my main priority is completing my top 3 task so just in case my 6 months old decides that he wants to be king of the day, I am covered. When my 5-year-old and/or husband comes home or when my son goes to sleep I can start to work on the other things on my list that I didn’t get to tackle earlier.

I also wake up in the middle of the night and many times I can’t go back to sleep so I will work on my top 3 things to get ahead in my day.  So make your list before you go to bed.

3. Work in an uncomfortable setting

Don’t work from your bed, the coach, in front of the TV, or any other place in your house where you can get comfy because you will get tired and see a good place to take a nap in your house and sleep will be your business for that day.  Don’t set yourself up for failure because it will work and you will be mad when you wake up. Work from your desk or at your kitchen table. If you were at a job, you would be working at a desk not your bed to act as if you are at a job

4. Buy cute stuff

Cute notebooks and pens motivate me to be productive. Get you some cute stuff that you like for your workspace to make it your own. If you were at a job, you would decorate your cubicle with pictures of your family. You also use your pink pens/pencils, glitter notebooks, and inspirational quotes so do the same thing for your home workspace. You need that décor to keep you motivated.

 

I had an office space in downtown Chicago on the 21st floor. So, working from my office and working from home was a major adjustment. Having a new baby though and wanted to stay home with him and take my daughter to and from school. The fact that I am saving the $1,200 a month bill that I was spending on rent. I save money that I won’t have to spend on daycare for my son and afterschool care for my daughter is a definite win. Working for the home requires discipline if you plan to produce as if you weren’t at home. I run my home-based business as the cooperation that I am. Working from home has major perks but you don’t want to turn perks into an everyday ritual. If you need a 15-minute power nap, take one but don’t turn that into a 3-hour sleeping session.

                                              

Going from Employee to Entrepreneur: The Mindset Shift

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Some of the most inspiring success stories out there are of people who left their corporate job after doing something they didn’t like for most of their life and being part of the system, just to do what they love, move to another place or work remotely while traveling the world.

All that is possible. You can create a lifestyle business. Starting something on the side first until you begin making money from it, and doing it only with the help of your laptop, is a sure way to design the life of your dreams and have all the time and freedom you’ve always dreamt about.

But there’s a mindset shift that goes together with this.

Some people become business owners, but in their head they are still employees. If they don’t have a strategy, if they don’t solve a real problem with their product or service and care about what they do, they just end up creating another job for themselves.

They still work long hours, deal with clients they don’t like, can’t delegate or automate things and thus can’t take a vacation anytime they want to.

The journey from an employee to entrepreneur starts on the inside first. You need to make the mental shift early on, to start creating systems that will one day replace you and still give you revenue, to become your own boss and know how you’ll manage your time once you have all of it for yourself.

So here are some tips on how to stop thinking like an employee:

Get clear about what you want

An awful thing is to work hard for years to create a business, just to realize that you aren’t ready or it’s not something you truly want.

Once you become an entrepreneur, you’ll have more responsibilities than ever. In the beginning, you’ll have to work more than the average, to go the extra mile every single day, to give it at least a year until you can see results.

Not everyone’s patient or strong enough for that. Some just prefer the illusion of security a 9 to 5 job gives.

So make sure you’re willing to make sacrifices for some time before you enjoy the benefits of working for yourself and being independent.

If you’re looking for inspiration and practical tips, check out this guide on how one woman left her 6-figure corporate job to pursue a better lifestyle. Inside you’ll also find 5 worksheets and 25 useful tools to get you started.

Overcome the mental barriers

A mindset shift requires you to get rid of the doubts. You must believe in yourself to such an extent that you should find the willpower to take action in the right direction every day.

Fear also gets in the way. It stops you from even giving something a try.

Work on letting go of these. Build momentum by defining why you want to change your life and become an entrepreneur and always keep this why in mind.

Find your niche

Don’t just start anything that seems profitable, choose a field you’re passionate about. That’s when you’ll do your best work, create products that make a difference and never get bored.

Define what you love doing, think about the things you’re good at and combine all this with what people are willing to pay for.

The Ultimate Guide to Uncover Your Passion and Create a Profit will help you find your true calling and turn it into your career.

Check out what competitors in the same niche are doing and what are the success factors. Make sure there’s a market for that, you don’t want to end up building something no one needs.

Do it on the side first

Start doing this long before you quit your job. Research takes time. First of all, get familiar with all the possible ways to make money from the Internet. That too is part of the mindset shift as you expand your horizons.

See what grabs your interest, what digital skills you’re willing to learn and how you can combine all that and turn it into something profitable.

You can also be a freelancer and still be your own boss, even if you don’t actually run a big business anytime soon.

If you’re a lawyer, writer, teacher, parent, or anything else, you already have experience and knowledge to share with people online. You just need the right medium for you. It may be video, creating courses, self-publishing eBooks on Amazon, having a podcast, running a blog, or else.

You’ll be slowly building your portfolio for some time and finding your first clients on sites that connect freelancers with employers. Once you begin making a decent income, feel free to quit your job and never look back again.

Create your personal brand

You’ll constantly be improving your skills, connecting with people, improving your online presence, networking and building relationships and growing your business. You can have a brand strategist like Brittney Fells help you along the way.

Becoming a lifelong learner is another part of the mindset shift that you’ll be making before you transform your current lifestyle.

Develop the habit of taking little actions a few times throughout the day that will help you build a name for yourself online.

What about you? What’s stopping you from making the mindset shift and starting to think like a boss?

Check out the preferred partners here at Womeneur for more inspiration or advice on anything biz-related from social media management and personal branding to copywriting and running your business successfully.

Personal Branding: Practical Ways to Improve Your Online Presence Today

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Personal branding may be the missing piece in your business.

Many of you are working hard to build a business online, and wonder why you may not get any results. You put in the time and hard work, you’ve chosen the right niche, have done your research and you’re constantly learning things, staying up-to-date on current events and improving their skills to offer even better products and services.

But you may be neglecting a key element of the digital success – your personal brand.

Personal branding is the process of constantly creating awareness for your brand, business and especially your name.

But things have changed in the last decade with the Internet evolving at the speed of light, which also creates opportunities to come up with innovative business models. It’s often hard to keep up.

One thing that’s becoming more and more important in the digital age is the power of your online presence. It’s a combination of all your activities online, every profile you’ve ever created, the comments you write here and there, the stuff you share with your friends, and how you talk about your business.

If you aren’t doing all of this consciously, chances are people will form the wrong opinion about you. Because today you yourself are a brand. Everything you do online becomes part of your overall message and affects the way people perceive you.

Luckily, you can always do something about it. If you’re a first-time business owner and just starting out, begin building your online presence today with the actions below. If you’re already in the game, make a step-by-step plan on how to improve it with concentrated and consistent actions.

Here at Womeneur we take personal branding very seriously. Every element on the site, everything we publish, everyone we welcome on board, every status we share on social media – all these are aligned with our core values.

What’s more, we have Brittany Fells to thank for when it comes to brand strategies. She shares practical advice on how to skyrocket your business and build a following with brand guidance and powerful visual content. So make sure you check her packages out.

Now, here are some things to do connected to personal branding to stand out from the crowd in a competitive niche and build a name for yourself out there:

3 Key Aspects of Personal Branding to Take Care Of

  1. Website.

You can’t go without a website today, that’s needless to say. It’s your digital home and the only place online you have full control over.

You’ll want to make it look great and add useful content to it because that’s where you’ll be attracting visitors and turning them into customers.

So get a domain name and a self-hosted WordPress site and start working on the home of your brand online. If you want to do it right but also save time and avoid the hassle, try our Starter WordPress Website Package

  1. Blog.

After setting up your website, it’s time to create the most important pages. The Homepage, the About page, the Contact page, and others such as one for sponsors, a portfolio, or else, depending on the type of business you run.

Take your time when creating each of these or hire a copywriter to do it for you (serviced by Womeneur Preferred Partner Vanessa Williams). It must look professional as that’s what potential clients will be looking at before deciding to work with you.

Then comes the moment to start your blog. Today every site must go together with a frequently updated blog because content is more important than ever.

It’s another way to get traffic from search engines, engage your audience, become an expert in the niche by sharing practical blog posts, and grow your website and brand.

A big part of your personal branding efforts are also the design elements of your site – your logo , the colors, the images you add to articles, the font, the tabs on the menu and how you name them, etc.

Don’t forget to make professional photos too as you’ll use them all over the Internet.

  1. Social media.

Once you take care of the previous aspects of personal branding, let’s get social.

Your audience is already spending time on almost every social media channel. So it’s your job to be there and connect with them.

That can happen by creating a profile, linking back to your site, sharing your own content and interesting stuff you read online, creating and posting motivational images and quotes at specific times, commenting on other people’s content, and sometimes just asking a question and starting a discussion.

Most aspects of social media can be automated and there are plenty of useful tools for that out there, but there’s still a lot of work to do. You need to get clear about your goals, how you’ll connect with the right people, how often you’ll post and when and what your strategy is. Our DIY Social Media Starter Kit can help you with all that.

Personal branding is a never-ending journey, so learn to enjoy it. You’ll constantly take focused actions in the right direction and see how you become popular in your niche and soon people start to find you more easily and tell their friends about your company and products. How awesome is that?

Before you go improve your online presence, though, check out our preferred partners again, who share their knowledge hoping to inspire more female entrepreneurs like you to transform their life and business.

How To Manage Your Time When There Are Too Many Things to Do

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Whether you’re working for someone else, are a freelancer, or already a business owner, there’s always one thing you seem to be struggling with – having enough time to get everything done.

Time management is a powerful skill and the foundation of being productive and balancing personal life and work. But how do we get better at it?

The main solution lies in working smarter instead of harder. Truth is there are some habits you can develop and techniques you can try that will help you get things done faster, save time and have more of it for yourself, be full of energy throughout the whole day and keep seeing progress without getting overwhelmed. Here are some of them:

1. See what can be eliminated.

If you take a closer look at your daily to-do list and your calendar, you’ll notice that not everything in there is essential.

Some of the things are just old activities you keep doing because it’s what you’re used to, others can be automated or delegated, and there are the things that simply don’t give you the results you want but you haven’t analyzed them to figure it out.

So now’s the perfect time. Take every item on your list and go through every activity or even tiny task or chore you dedicate time to. Ask yourself whether it’s really necessary. Think about removing it and see what’s the worst that can happen. Most of the times, nothing will really change. So cross this off your list and you’ll have more time to do the things that actually get you ahead in life.

2. Prioritize.

[bctt tweet=”Life is all about priorities” username=”womeneur”] But if you haven’t set aside any time to define these, then you’re living on autopilot and doing many random things too. That’s something that can ruin your chances for success, especially in business.

Prioritizing means arranging all the areas in your life in order of importance. For most people it’s family, for instance, but if they haven’t thought about it and included the family-related stuff on the top of their to-do list and planned them in advance, they can easily put work before that.

So, what is it that you care about the most?

It is personal development? Then make a step-by-step plan on what new habit to develop next, schedule some reading time daily, start meditating and journaling.

Is it improving your personal brand? Then add an hour of networking, building your portfolio and sharing valuable content on social media to your list and do this before checking email or other secondary things.

3. Define and remove distractions to focus better.

You’ll get things done faster and perform better if you concentrate easily and don’t get interrupted. So here’s what you can do about it:

Tell others not to bother you (enter the room, call or text you) while you’re doing your most important work for the day.

Forget about meetings. They are a huge distraction and nothing important is discussed there. What happens is that your workflow is interrupted and you need time to get back in the zone after that.

Block access to the Internet with a free software if you have to do some serious work offline.

Set some limits to using social media and browsing purposelessly. Don’t do it while working as notifications keep coming in all the time and you’re engaging your mind with unnecessary information.

When you notice you’re procrastinating, try this: Remember why you need to get this done and how good you’ll feel once you complete it. Break it down into smaller actions and make a list of the first 3 steps, each of which will take you less than 5 minutes. Now simply get to work on the first one. That will help you build momentum and keep going.

4. Assign a time to everything.

[bctt tweet=”Deadlines work wonders, so even if you don’t have one, set one” username=”womeneur”]

What’s more, have a fixed time of the day when you’ll start working on a task and plan out how long it will take. Then, once the time comes, you’ll find it easier to focus and actually get it done in the given time period.

5. Don’t strive for perfection.

Perfectionism is an enemy to productivity. So let go of the desire to get everything done and to be perfect. Know that your time is limited and there’s only so much you can do in 24 hours.

That’s when prioritizing comes in handy. Once you eliminate the non-essentials, you’ll have more time, but after prioritizing you’ll know where to start.

Define the 3 most important tasks for the day every morning, or even the night before, and get to work on them first. Only when you’re done can you move to less important stuff.

This way you’ll always be moving in the right direction and will feel accomplished before noon.

So, what about you? How do you manage your time and make sure everything important is done?

Womeneur Resources To Help With Time Management

  1. Simply Yours Day Planner
  2. Clever Girl Personal Financial Life Planner
  3. Girl, Get it Together

4 Tips to Help You Focus on Your Business (After Your 9 to 5)

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Lately, those “take the jump” motivational videos have been making the rounds on various social media platforms. You’ve seen those video clips with the “all-in or nothing” kind of message.

I am not dogging the message. I watch them and get pumped, just like everyone else. But let’s face facts, most of us are works in progress and for whatever reasons, we cannot just stop showing up at our 9-to-5. Bills need to be paid, and a girl’s got to eat. But trust me when I say when the moment is right – I’m gone!

So what should we focus on so we don’t feel overwhelmed? How can we keep slaying the 9to5, and still build our business like a boss?

The following are four incredible tips that I think will make the most impact on your business despite (okay – with the help of) your 9to5.

  1. Start thinking of your 9-to-5 as a blessing

Until recently, I always thought of my 9-to-5 as a big ol’ anchor holding me back from building my entrepreneurial empire. That couldn’t be further from the truth, the majority of my customers are from my 9to5.

Your 9-to-5 is the gasoline that will keep your dreams alive. So, it’s time to stop thinking of your 9to5 as something that is dragging you down, but as a partner that is holding you up until the time is right to leave. Use it to your advantage.

2. Align forces

[bctt tweet=”It’s super important to make getting your product or service in front of more people your top priority.” via=”no”]

Start reaching out to other businesses who reach a similar audience to see if they’d be interested in doing a marketing campaign. I have a skincare mini-franchise, I reached out to an up-and-coming make-up artist and we held an event for our customers. It was super successful!

Begin to spend your week strategizing between one and three ways in which you could market your brand, and map them out. Then pick one of these to implement the next week, and see what works. You’d be surprised!

3. Map it out

[bctt tweet=”There is no sugar-coating it: successful businesses are built on consistent imperative action taken daily. #womeneur” username=”womeneur”]

No busy work. No checking more email. No unnecessary phone calls. You only have so many hours to work on your side hustle outside of your 9to5 hours, so you have to make them count.

Start using Friday as your planning day for the week ahead. I still utilize Sunday to make sure the weekly plan that I created on Friday is a go. I’ve learned that these two days really clear up my headspace so I can be present with friends and family on the weekend.

By getting things planned out on Friday (and finalized on Sunday) you’re able to hit the ground running on Monday morning.

4. Be present online (Every. Day.)

It’s really easy to lose track of time while at your 9to5, but the power of being present online is incredible. I make sure to post on my favorite social media platforms at least twice a day. If you know you can’t do this at work, scheduling apps like Buffer or Hootsuite make it easier for you to be online when you can’t.

Utilize any online groups you might be in. Becoming known for what you do is powerful, and it can easily transition into referrals. The more referrals you get can mean more work, and more work means more money in your pocket.

Engage with others by answering questions as they come up in the groups, and adding advice when it’s appropriate. I make it a practice to give more than I promote.

Working a full-time job, while building a business is not an easy task, but we’re doing it. If you feel you need extra help to develop a business or marketing strategy, Womeneur has got your back.