5 ways to hold on to your sanity when you work at home

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When most people start contemplating the idea of working at home, they envision living without the stress and hectic pace we’ve become used to when we work in Cubicle World. (I can hear the laughter coming from all of you work at home people all the way out here in Omaha!)

Even when I started out working at home for another company and I had set hours and a supervisor telling me what to do, it was still stressful. Working in an office allowed me to forget about all of the stuff I needed to do at home. I could sit at my desk without seeing the pile of dishes that needed to be done. I wasn’t distracted by the TV or tempted by my cozy blanket and paperback book on the couch next to me.

Then when I decided to work for myself instead of someone else, it became even more stressful. That security of a steady income meant I had to constantly worry about being able to pay rent or buy groceries for the week and finding enough clients to make that happen. And we won’t even talk about those days when the kids are out of school or, for some of you, having kids who aren’t yet school age.

Those visions of work at home bliss sure don’t last very long. Over the past year and a half, I’ve learned that you have to make a conscious effort to reduce and maybe even eliminate some of the chaos that goes along with working at home.

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Be open to opportunities

As I write this, I’m sitting here listening to my boyfriend play his guitar which would normally be a pretty unremarkable event. (Not that he’s an unremarkable guitar player, it’s just that he plays guitar all the time so it’s nothing out of the ordinary for him to be doing it now.)
What’s remarkable about it [...]

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Measuring success

Oh what an exciting life I lead! I spent my Friday night reading the latest issue of Inc. magazine. An interview with Stan Lee (yes, the Spiderman guy), another interview with someone who wrote a biography on Ayn Rand, and then a piece on Jason Fried of 37 Signals and what a typical day looks [...]

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Do you need to blog regularly if you have a service-based business?

Earlier this week, I had a nice long chat with a friend and colleague of mine who started her business around the same time I started mine. We were discussing some of the things we’ve learned over the past year and one of the topics was something along the lines of advice we’d been given [...]

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Careful with that axe, Eugene (and that subject line!)

I’ve ended up on too many Internet Marketing lists and I go through periods where I just start unsubscribing in the hopes of eliminating all the noise in my inbox.
Today I unsubscribed from the list of a major, well-known Internet Marketer. Why? Because of the subject line of his email… “Copywriter Commits Suicide?”
I understand that [...]

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Who IS your target market?

As I was listening to Alexis Martin Neely on her monthly coaching call with the Personal Family Lawyer group today, part of the topic was Target Market and it really got me thinking because I know that can be one of the most overlooked aspects when it comes to running your business.
Actually, I say “running” [...]

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Headway theme rocks my world…and my blog

Have you seen my new blog design? I am absolutely in love with it! And Clay Griffiths is my new hero because he’s the designer behind the new Headway theme (as well as the son of my friend Grant Griffiths) which is the theme I’m now using.
Now on the surface, it may not be obvious [...]

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Why I switched from GoDaddy to Name.com

If you’ve visited AprilTara.com over the past week or so, you probably saw nothing but an ad-cluttered page courtesy of GoDaddy. If I’d known transferring my domain from them would be such a hassle, I would have posted a warning here.
Transferring domains is a lot more of a pain than I thought it would be. [...]

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Refocusing

I took a couple of months off from blogging – not just here but on all of my blogs – to regain my sense of direction after some health issues and personal issues forced me to reevaluate things.
Now that I’m back on track, I’ll be posting more often and I’ll be doing some guest blogging [...]

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Stop listening to Twitter “experts”

Just because someone takes a word and throws a “tw” in front of it does NOT make them a Twitter expert. Seriously. There are only two things that you need to get the most out of Twitter: common sense and a personality.
Twitter is basically just a simple form of communication, much like the telephone.  Do [...]

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Virtually Successful

Just a few short months after starting my VA business I started getting emails and private messages on forums asking me one of two questions:
1) Are you hiring?
2) How can I start my own VA business?
While I was flattered that someone thought, at that stage, that I was successful enough to answer those questions, I [...]

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