Todays Mompreneur

This is not to say that your kids can’t help out with tasks within your business, I am thinking much more along the lines of not bringing business into your time with family.

One too many times I have allowed my work stress and work frustrations to come with me once I walk away from the computer. That is simply not fair to my family. When I am cantankerous and unhappy over something I was working on, it’s not fair to pass that on when interacting with everyone else.

No one is perfect and we all get frustrated once in a while. When was the last time you let a bit of that irritation over something you were dealing with within your business come with you when you walked away? Were you a little extra snippy and impatient? This is exactly why we need to leave it behind! We, as in me and you.

I think sometimes we forget to shut down those frustrations until the next time we load them back up. It can be hard, we don’t have an on/off switch working our emotions. There is one thing I have learned from my own experience, though… Once I find that trick to turn off work and move back to mom, everyone is much happier.

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I am stubborn, hard-headed, determined to do everything myself, but I can’t. I like to learn new talents, but that easy-to-distract attitude often has me spreading into too many avenues. I don’t like to ask for help.

That do it yourself attitude can get you into trouble, especially in business. If you concentrate on too many tasks at once, it can slow you down. This is why there is nothing wrong with asking for help, hiring an Independent Contractor, or even hiring an employee. When you delegate tasks out, you can concentrate on the more important things within your position as founder, president or CEO - whatever it is you call yourself. Those are titles that come with their own list of duties and you need others to cover your butt when necessary.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some form of knowledge in these areas. Although you hire employees to help, you need to know what is going on to stay in tune. Just be careful of how much you put on your plate at one time. You don’t need to go to school to become a bookkeeper if you want to know what your accountant is doing with your money.

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For me, nothing is worse than trying to explain what I do. I dread that question, even if I can see it coming from a mile away.

“Angel, what do you do?”

“Well, Random Person, I write for a living but I do a lot of Virtual Assistant-style work and that pays the bills.”

insert the blank stare… “What do you do?”

“I’ve done email-based interviews with business owners, write blog posts, write articles, some random as-needed tasks like comment moderation for a blog…” (insert my mom who mentions I did something related to calendars recently)

“Oh Calendars! That is cool!”

“I gathered dates, I didn’t build a calendar…”

“Oh… I don’t understand that stuff.”

As lovely as that conversation was, it taught me that you can not explain a damn thing to someone who doesn’t think outside the box. Maybe it’s just the community I live in, but the words blog and working from home fly right over the heads of people.

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Normally when I deem my day off over at 9pm on Saturday, I found myself going to bed instead. Sure I had work plans. I even needed to write here (and, as you may have noticed, I didn’t).

I’d been suffering through this headache, or shall we call it a migraine, for 3 days at that point. I would go to sleep with it and wake up with it still there. It would only get worse as the day passed until I would finally go to bed. So when it came down to feeling like I was going to cry, I realized taking the day off wasn’t enough so I took the night off too. However, after all of that, I found yet another gem I could polish and post here.

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Many decide to start their own business, at-home or otherwise, because they seem to think it will be easy. Of course they eventually learn from experience that it is not.

The idea of working for yourself can sometimes blind you with glamorizing terms: No need for daycare! Set your own hours! More flexibility!

Each momportunity is different, but one thing is the same: You might need a part-time babysitter to entertain your children when you’ve hit your own personal deadline. You get what you put into your business, so the more hours you dedicate to it the more you’ll get out of it. You can rearrange your work hours, but you’ll pay for it later.

Starting a business is like a circus. It is fun, it is stressful and you’ll be doing a lot of balancing to make it all work!

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When you put together a busy week, a holiday, some company, and an early appointment the next morning, you will end up with me.

The week was a long one. If you stop by my house, you will find me working. I am always working. That is my life as a mompreneur. However, someone stopped by to visit on Halloween, I took my daughter trick or treating and had to hope that coffee could pull me through until all of my work was done. Of course I had an appointment for my daughter early the next morning (today). It has hard enough getting in at a time that she didn’t have school, so 8:45am was a must.

I am the true example of why you shouldn’t rush yourself and try to play supermom. I found myself with a list of things to do that felt a mile high when I got home. I was exhausted from walking around for over an hour, my knee was acting up and I could have fallen asleep standing. I decided to make pumpkin pie so at least I would have an excuse to not fall asleep while I was on the clock. All was fine and dandy until I took out the cooked pies and let them cool a bit.

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Sure, Halloween isn’t a real holiday. Unless you live in my house. My daughter has been asking if we could go trick or treating again since the day after Halloween last year.

I have always been a fan of this holiday. At least, I was a fan until I started working from home. Now I find myself working holidays, a lot. Sure I could take half a day off so we could still enjoy all of those fun things that come with Halloween, but in my world the hours I don’t work are the hours I don’t make any money. Normally it is not a big deal, but there are necessities that need my attention and it’s getting close to the time when I need to start buying Christmas and birthday presents for my lovely daughter.

So I will be working Halloween.

Unless you planned ahead, you might also find yourself working today. That does not have to happen every time a new holiday approaches, though. Here are a few tips to help you prepare so you can have that much deserved day off.

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