Virtual Assistants - How to Stay Focused In Your Home Office

If you're a virtual assistant, balancing managing a household, looking after the kids, and taking care of your clients, you can feel pulled in several directions at once! The following article has some good advice.

Staying Focused in your WAHM Office by Barbara Ryan

You all know the drill, you sit down to get some work done and within minutes your engrossed in non-business emails or checking the previous days website traffic stats. Next thing you know, an hour has passed and the kids are up. You’ve gotten little to nothing done and now there are diapers to change, sippy cups to fill, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to make.

Getting your work done on a daily basis means staying focused. How do you stay focused?

Set a work schedule, write it down, and stick to it.
Determine when you can work most efficiently when the kids are in school, napping, or a time of day when they can play well independently. Most likely, it will be a combination of the three.

Limit email and stats checking.
Check business emails at scheduled times and determine this based on the importance of email to your business. Limit checking personal emails to specific times after your work is done or when you need a mental break from working. Check stats only once per day.

Get caller ID.
Yes, screen your calls. You are working and should not be answering calls you know take up your precious work time un-necessarily. Let friends and family know you schedule and that they should not call during these times.

Working from home can be very challenging. Balancing being a mom, a wife, and a business owner is no easy task. Staying focused and keeping a schedule will help run a more productive and successful business, get more done, and have more free time with the kids, which was the whole point of working from home to begin with, wasn’t it?



Barbara Ryan is publisher and co-editor of Mom2Mom Magazine , an online magazine written by moms for moms. Barbara is also owner and designer of Cherish Collages, a custom Photo Collage Design business developed from the love of a digital photography hobby.

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com