Well, perfection may not happen – but you can be a productive, efficient and happy work at home mom, or WAHM. In fact, this website is dedicated to helping you get there. But why would you want to work from home?

Most of us look for a home based business for moms because we want to be home with our children. Face it, the picture the world paints of the confident career woman with vibrant, intelligent kids in the best daycares and private schools doesn’t often happen. More often than not it’s a frazzled, overworked mom trying to balance home, career, and kids.

Being a WAHM is not all roses, of course, and you’ll meet plenty of challenges on your way to the goal of a prosperous business, but you can create a life that works for you and your family rather than one that revolves around a job you rush in to do for somebody else.

What are some opportunities for moms to work at home?

You probably know many of the standard jobs – opportunities to do catalog sales or party plans, medical transcription, freelancing, and other jobs moms have traditionally held.

These jobs are all OK. They can be a great opportunity for you to get out of the “work force” and into an opportunity you’re building for yourself.

But they still have a major flaw – they require you to be there, and on someone else’s clock. You have to be ready to make deliveries and schedule parties when somebody else says they need you. You’re at the mercy of the doctors or offices that need transcription services now. And freelancers and wahm web designers often have deadlines established by clients. You’re not free to use your time as you see fit. You still have to fit your life around your work.

What’s the Solution for WAHM Mums?

There’s a lot that goes into success in a mom’s home businss – but I think the most important factor of success is choosing the right opportunity. And the right opportunity is choosing a business you can build that will work without you.

I’ve been a WAHM for five years now, and I have found that this mindset – creating a business that works without you is not an easy one to grasp. We tend to feel that we’re pretty important people!

But think about it – you want the freedom to be with your children, to care for your home, and enjoy adventures with your family. You don’t want to be chained to the desk – not even the desk in your home office.

Even if you own your own business, if you’re stuck at your desk day after day you own a job… not a business. Moms need a business – something that brings in money for them without a lot of work on their part. You need to be managing your business, not working in it.

I really enjoy design. I like to design the graphics for my web pages, so I often do. But I realize that if it would give me more time with my kids, it would be best for me to have somebody else produce the graphics.

The Best Way for Moms to Work From Home

The best way for moms to work from home is building a web-based business. There are other ways – I know of effecient call centers and other businesses that only require a couple of weeks from their owners. But a web-based business is an easy way for a WAHM to “jump in” to the business world.

You can build your website yourself at first, then put systems in place that will keep your website moving up and into the world on its own steam. It will make money while you sleep, while you take your kids to the beach, or while you take them to visit another country!

The web is 24/7 – and it keeps trucking while you live your life (away from the computer).

Check out the free WAHM Masters Course to get more detailed information on how and why the web works for moms:

You may resist setting a schedule because you want to feel free and spontaneous. Maybe you don’t want a “rigid” schedule locking you into anything. Let me tell you a big secret: a schedule is your friend and a ticket to peace and sanity. That’s right – you get more done and have more fun with a schedule than you ever do without one.

A stay at home mom schedule may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not. First, a schedule benefits your children. Children like to know “what happens next.” They take comfort in the day to day routine. A guiding routine makes them much more able to enjoy an occassional difference. They can even come to anticipate scheduled changes, such as one morning a week spent shopping.

A schedule or routine also keeps children out of trouble. Bored children tend to be the ones who find time to get “up to no good.” Or children act out when they feel like they haven’t had enough of your time. A schedule lets you make sure you’re giving them the attention they need (and you’re teaching them to play cheerfully on their own for short periods of time). It also keeps them occupied, either with activities, time with you, or with planned free play.

Your schedule benefits you by defining your day. You know it’s time to get up and shed those PJ’s in favor of clothes. Your mealtimes are part of the routine instead of sporadic and thrown together. Want to spend time reading to the kids daily? It’s in the daily routine. How about an arts and crafts time? An independent playtime for the kids while you work on your business for a little while?

You’ll finally have time to do those things you really want to do (sewing, crafts, writing, maybe even reading!). You lso fit in the things you know your husband really wants you to get done… and show him that you do more than change diapers (that’s said in a joking way, ladies!)

So, how do you go about setting up a stay at home mom schedule, or a work at home mom schedule? It depends on the age of your kids, if they’re at home, home schooled, or at school, and what your needs are. I always recommend setting times for the “pillars” of your day – wake up time, breakfast, lunch, supper, and bed time (for you and the kids). If you have young children you may have snack time as a “pillar” too. You fit everything else in around that.

I’ve written an article that gets more in detail: Nitty Gritty on Creating a Stay at Home Mom Schedule.

If you want more in-depth, detailed help with many real-world examples, the best resource I’ve found is the book Managers of Their Homes. The book is written for home schooling families from a Christian perspective.

I have never seen such a well-written book on scheduling for moms. I use the Maxwell family’s system in my home and have been doing so for years – with great results. It’s a “take what speaks to you book” – for instance I don’t use the baby schedules as much at the Maxwells do, but there’s great advice within the book.

Good time management doesn’t just let you to get what you want to done – with your children, with your family, with your home, and with your business …It also lets you feel a sense of control. When you feel in control of life and how things are going, you feel better, you’re more efficient, and you’re a much more cheerful mother!

Now it’s true that you can’t always be “in control” of things in life – but the key is to make peace with what you can’t control. Organize and manage your time so you’re taking care of the things you can.

I’ve got some quick time management tips for you – plus more in-depth articles that let you gain control of your life and keep things running smoothly (and happily)

A time management system keeps you on top of your priorities. You know that you’re working in time for those life essentials – housework, cooking, etc. And you have time to get some of your business work done every day. But the biggest gift you get is time to spend with your family without worrying about what you’re “not getting done.”

Mastering basic time management skills lets you utilize any system more effectively – these skills range from creating routines in your own life to developing decisiveness. Adding these habits and systems to your life frees you from a lot of stress – and as a mom and a successful entrepreneur the last thing you need is more stress (or wasted time).

Something that helps significantly is developing a working schedule. A stay at home mom schedule (or work at home mom schedule) gives you the structure you need to maintain the household – and you still have time for your work. It’s also a good way to organize your children’s days. Children love and thrive on routine… and lets face it, happy children keep you sane!

I love reading about different time management systems – I’ll admit I’m a bit of junkie for books on managing life! I give you an overview of some of my favorite books below:

Get a general overview of the Best Time Management Books
Getting Things Done Review
Time Power Review
Master Your Workday Now! Review

You need to discover the skills for managing your life. You weren’t taught how to manage a household, much less a household and a successful business while you’re parenting (and often taking care of a spouse!) The articles linked on this page give you confidence and solid techniques you can put into practice right away.

That refrain from the song has been running through my head this evening, however. I’ve come pretty close to tears a few times today because the last few days have been a huge emotional roller coaster.

There have been a lot of ups – my brother came to visit, Galen is eating well, and January was my highest income month, ever – by a pretty large margin. It’s super exciting to see my hard work paying off. It gives me a warm rush to think that all my studying and testing is really working.

But then there’s the inevitable downs, and wow, have there been a lot this week – and it has hardly gotten started.

Transferring my sole proprietership into an LLC has been very exciting, but it has also been a little trying. It’s confusing to figure out everything I need to do. And it’s a bit intimidating. I was able to get the bank accounts set up just fine, but applying for credit for the LLC has been challenging. Since my credit was absolutely ruined during my first marriage I am still trying to get back to the place I was before. It’s really aggravating that three years of never being late on the one credit card I was able to keep hasn’t seemed to make much difference in my credit score.

Basically what it means is that the LLC will be completely bootstrapping it for awhile. I’ve bootstrapped pretty much the entire way so I don’t really mind, but it’s hard not to let the “powers that be” of the credit world get demoralizing in their judgements.

Then I have a package coming that I’ve been waiting for. It was supposed to get delivered today, but it’s apparently lost somewhere since it didn’t get here. And the tracking on the package hasn’t been updated in about five days. So God only knows where that thing is.

Then, there’s Google. I love Google, actually. I like the Adsense program because it pays me well (lol). And I like Adwords, I like Gmail, I even like Google Wave. But apparently Google doesn’t quite like the LLC because I cannot get the LLC approved for an Adsense account. This causes issues because, well, the LLC is about to own Natural Birth and Baby Care – and Getting-Pregnant.com . Getting-Pregnant doesn’t serve Adsense yet, but Natural Birth and Baby Care certainly does. So now I need to figure out how to please Adsense – and their customer support is really unfriendly. There’s really no way I can get in contact with them to find out exactly what they think is wrong. I got a generic “your site is under construction” message and, well, this site is not exactly “under construction.” It’s pretty constructed!

On top of trying to find packages, dechiper Google, and get over the insults of credit denials, I’m way, way behind on writing. So I have tons of articles to write and post and get done. All while I’m trying to sort all of this stuff out.

Oh, and my brother went home. Which makes me sad because I don’t know when I’ll see him again.

But at least we had a visit. And Galen is eating well. And Scott is happy because his package did arrive today. And, well, I shattered my income goals for last month. That’s always cool.

But sometimes the bad things outweigh even the very good, so I found myself looking at my goal board and I found myself reading something over and over again. I can’t remember where this came from originally so forgive, but I’m going to type it out here. Because yeah, I may get knocked down – but I’ll get up again. Nothing will keep me down.

“If you think you are beaten, you are.
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you like to win but think you can’t
It is almost certain you won’t.

Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.”

This battle is going to the gal who knows she can

My sites are doing well enough that I wanted to formalize my business a bit more.  Right now it’s pretty interesting figuring out how to get everything moved over to a business’ name, and applying for things for the business.  It really forces me to do and think about things in a more logical way.  That’s good, in the end I think.

It feels a little overwhelming now, but it’s a good learning experience and I suspect soon it won’t be so intimidating.

Even with the overwhelm, it’s really exciting.  It feels like a big accomplishment!

So I often find myself learning new things and teaching myself how to do things. I’ve developed a way to help myself learn things more quickly and thoroughly, and I thought I’d share with you.

I pick up new skills and knowledge through periods of intense focus. I actually got this idea from a male blogger. He takes the strategy to the extreme – spending time focusing on what he’s learning and ignoring everything else for whatever his period of time to learn is (days or weeks). It works well for him. That strategy just does not work for mothers. We have too much that needs to be done every day.

If you’re a work at home mom like I am, you have even more that needs to be done each day. But you can’t just dump parenting to take time to work on a project. You can’t forget that your children need three meals a day while you spend hours devoted to your sewing project. Your meals just won’t get planned and your grocery list won’t get made if you’re devoting weeks to a project and decide to chuck everything else. I think this strategy could work very well for a single person, or for someone who is not the primary caretaker of children and home. It could probably work if your children are in school during the day, too. But for me homeschooling my older children and caring for preschoolers the “pure focus on one project/area of study” just won’t work.

However, I’ve found a variation of it that’s very effective, even while you’re a busy mother and/or work-at-home mom.

My strategy is as follows: first decide what you want to focus on. Then devote your time to learning just about that focus. Where you may have read a novel or two, a book on gardening, a book on parenting, and a book on having a well behaved cat all in one month, you’ll now choose just one focus. I did this right after Christmas and through the first several weeks of January with our nutrition. I got a stack of books on nutrition I wanted to read. Then I devoted my free time to reading about nutrition or working in the kitchen to implement what I’d learned.

This may sound like a really simple concept but I’ve found it works tremendously well. Most of the focus of my free time to read was on nutrition. Since the books I was reading were similar in subject I found I could move through my reading more quickly. I could skim over bits that I was already familiar with from another book because the information was so fresh. I could quickly compare what I’d read in the different books. And I could try out many different things in the kitchen throughout the course of those few weeks, refining my time in the kitchen and my family’s good nutrition.

The strategy of focusing intensely on one subject of interest worked really well for me. I’m doing it again right now as I go through several books on parenting and family rhythm. Reading all the books one after the other is allowing me compare the ideas and thoughts each author presents. It’s helping me to look at our day-to-day life and my day-to-day outlook and figure out where to make changes to be more effective. It’s also allowing me to work out a plan for changes that I want to make in our daily routine and my parenting. I can work out my plan now and revise that as I work through all the books. Then I’ll be able to work through the plan and see how things go for us – rather than continuously changing things around as a read a new book on family issues here, and then another one there, and so forth.

As with the nutrition study, I feel like my mind is focused on what I’m reading now and I can quickly increase my knowledge and work through things in my own mind. It’s very nice. During my focus on parenting I’m also keeping a notebook of things I glean from each book – my hope is that when I’m done reading I’ll have my own “parenting book” full of the wisdom I gleaned during my time of focus.

I plan to use this approach throughout the rest of the year with each area that I decided to work on this year (mostly issues having to do with home management and family life, as is evidenced by nutrition and parenting in my examples!)

If I have novels I want to read I’m planning to do so between my times of focus. Scott says I don’t read enough novels or books just “for fun” but alas – I have a lot I want to teach myself and I really want to continuously improve my mothering and my household management. That just doesn’t leave much time for fiction!

I’ve also found that picking focuses that are highly relevant to my life currently helps me to spend more time working with what I’m learning. Since I’m in the kitchen at least five times a day anyways, experimenting with what I learned during the nutrition study was pretty easy to do. And parenting and family life issues… well I get the chance to work on that every day – day in and day out (isn’t one of the joys of mothering that no matter how bad you mess up one day, there’s still the next day, and the next day, and the next day to try again)!

If you’d like to read the article that inspired this one, it’s Steve Pavlina’s article on rapid improvement – I think it’s a good article. I do, however, disagree with a lot of what Steve Pavlina writes and I want to say that I’m not endorsing him in any way, shape, or form. I do find some of his articles to be thought provoking, this being one of them. And I’m sure he’ll appreciate the link. :p