Between taking care of your little ones, doing the laundry, and keeping the house clean, it feels like you barely have any time to work on growing your online biz, amiright?
Every moment that you do have to work on your biz is so valuable, and you don’t want a second to go to waste.
You love working from home so you don’t miss a moment with your little ones, but you also feel a bit stressed sometimes when it comes to your biz.
Trust me there’s an easier way. There’s a way to be more productive, and get more work done, while actually working fewer hours.
1. Multitasking
This one is probably the one you have heard the most often, and that is for a very good reason. When you’re trying to multitask, whether it’s trying to work & making dinner at the same time, or flipping between multiple open tabs on your browser, the truth is you’re wasting a whole lot of time.
At best, multitasking makes all tasks take much longer than focusing on one at a time. At worst multitasking creates an enormous amount of stress, to the point that you just shut the laptop and call it quits for the day.
One of the biggest distractors are those things constantly with us making noise, and no, I don’t mean your little ones. I’m talking about your phone.
How many times has your phone broken your focus? Even if you don’t pick it up or look at the screen, you still wonder what the notification was, right?
RELATED POST: How to Stop Multitasking & Actually Get Things Done
2. Context Switching
Ok, now this may sound similar to multitasking, but hear me out.
Context
It can cost you up to 40% of your productivity, can you believe that?
How to avoid missing out on that productivity, ’cause that’s a lot, right? An effective way to avoid this, is knowing when to work. Having set times that are completely distraction free to work helps to prevent you from getting into the flow o
RELATED POST: How to Fight Context Switching as a Mamapreneur
3. Not Knowing Your Daily Goals
You finally get a chance to work after the kids are in bed. You crack open your laptop and… You have no idea where to start. You open Facebook, or maybe check your to-do list for something easy to quickly cross of the list.
From there you just go wherever your mind, or maybe more realistically your notifications, take you.
You close your laptop at the
The thing is, there was time, at least a little bit, right? But it was just the way that it was used. Letting your thoughts or your notifications lead your work, will often end in that result.
Imagine instead sitting down to work, and looking at your two daily goals. Just two simple things to get done by the end of the day, in order to grow your biz to your long-term goals.
Instead of working for the here and now, you are working to create the biz you want to have in the future.
Instead of listening to notifications dragging you off to Facebook in the middle of writing a blog post, you know the only two things you have to cross off for the day.
You focus on those two things, and only those two things until they are done.
RELATED POST: How to Create Better Daily Goals to Boost Your Biz
4. Interruptions
One of the hardest things about being a wahm, is being a mama who works at home,
Working from home is one of the hardest things I have done because there are no real boundaries. You work in the same place that you eat, raise your kids, do the laundry, watch Netflix, chill after a hard day, I could go on forever.
Whether its our little ones interrupting our focus to play, or our brain pulling us away because it really wants to binge-watch those next episodes, they are a constant reality.
One of the first ways to start tackling this it to set up expectations. Interruptions happen the most when work-life and mom-life collide. So the first thing we gotta do is set up some strong family boundaries.
RELATED POST: How to Keep Strong Family Boundaries as a Mamapreneur
After you have established boundaries, you will probably find that you have less time to work, but that’s actually a good thing. And here’s why.
Having less time means that it has to be used in a better way, because every second is more valuable, right?
You will probably notice that your times to work are while the kids are napping, or at preschool. These are the perfect times to use for time batching.
Time batching is just a block of time you use to focus on a dedicated goal to knock out. It actually reduces multitasking and context switching, plus it helps you knock out a daily goal.
Productivity as a wahm doesn’t sound so hard now, does it?
RELATED POST: How to Start Time Batching as a Mamapreneur
5. Lacking Motivation
This is a huge one, and sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it really relates to productivity right?
Sometimes we just don’t feel like working. Maybe it’s because we are having a hard day with the kids, or because we are tired, or we just feel fake, like we aren’t really even doing anything with our biz.
I have totally felt that way ?
But you know what always picks me right back up? Knowing the dreams I have for my biz. Envisioning the future of how I want my life to look like while pursuing my passion and never missing a moment with my daughter.
But more than just dreaming it up, breaking it down until it becomes just two daily goals I can do right now to get just a little bit closer.
Feeling stuck? Write down how your biz would look if you had unlimited resources, and post it on your wall above your desk. Look at it each time you sit down to work to remind yourself that “Today, I’m gonna get a little bit closer to that dream.“
RELATED POST: How to Dream Up Your Ultimate “I’ve Made It” Biz
Even if you know your dream, sometimes you just aren’t in the mood, right?
We all have those days right, and sometimes we do really need time off. But other times, what we really need is a good push.
So how do you push yourself when your own brain is the one being lazy?
You trick it.
You don’t even give it a chance to think.
You use the 5-Second Rule from Mel Robbins.
The second you think about going to work, or you know it’s the start of your time block, and you feel yourself beginning to back out, count backwards from 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 and you sit down and you work.