As the new year approaches, I’ve been obsessing more and more about what 2010 is going to bring me – or rather, what I’m going to achieve in 2010. I’ve got some pretty hefty goals set and one of those goals is to get so organized, it will make me want to puke. To say that I like to have my ducks in a row is an understatement. I need my ducks perfectly aligned and if one feather is out of place, I don’t run at optimal speed.

My passions and interests have changed drastically over the last decade but one thing that always stays the same is the fact that I’m an organizing freakshow. I love to be organized and I love finding new ways to become even more sickenly organized.

Motivation and inspiration are two big things for me. I need one to jump start the other, but I need to be organized before I can even begin to be either. I continuously make more money each month and I can thank my insane organizing skills for the majority of it.

Working online involves a lot of juggling, no matter what, and it’s not a skill that everybody has. Some people actually work better when their desks are piled miles high with random papers, dirty dishes, nail clippings and remnants of snacks from weeks before. If that’s you, no need to read further.

On the other hand, if you’re like me, here are some handy resources to check out so you can get your organizing skills in shape for the new year:

Organizing Your Home Office – Links

A designer’s tips for organizing the home office with some style – 5 tips for organizing a home office.

Nicole Balch is the Queen of making organization pretty. Check out her studio to see what I mean.

There’s nothing like some pleasantly eye-catching file folders to encourage you to get organized and stay organized.

Clutter is evil. At least for me it is. That’s what the unclutterer blog rocks, and in particular, the office organization archive.

Lifehacker has some worthy home office hacks to think about while you’re in organizing-mode.

If nothing else in your house is organized, at least your computer should be. Read How to Create a Minimalist Computer Experience.

20 Time-Saving Tips to Improve Designer’s Workflow – Even if you’re not a web designer, there are tips in this post that can not only help you organize your Mac or PC, but they can save you loads of time especially if you deal with a lot of images while blogging.

Organize your browser. Organize your desktop. Organize your folders. If you’re bold enough, branch out from your office area and organize other areas of your house too. It’s much easier to keep each room clean and in order when the rest of the house is too. Otherwise, the clutter creep will rear it’s ugly head in no time flat.

If staying organized isn’t your strong suit, keep these resources handy and plug away at them as you have time. You’ll find that the more organized you get, the more time you have to get more organized! Or spend time with family and other important things like that…

So what are your favorite organizing tips or resources?

Information overload is quite common in the online world. It’s also very common to get overwhelmed with all the tasks that come with working online. There are so many options! Which ones do you choose?

Time is money, right folks? No matter how good you are, Santa isn’t going to bring you more hours in the day for Christmas.

If this is you, here’s a little exercise you can try to help you determine which things you should focus on and which things you should drop.

You’ll need to think about everything you do that you consider part of your business building methods and compile them all into a list.

The items that may be on your list could include but are not limited to:

• buying advertising
• article marketing
• social media marketing
• affiliate marketing
• selling your own products or services
• blogging
• posting in forums
• recording podcasts, interviews, etc.
• offline marketing
• email marketing
• building membership sites
• setting up squeeze pages
• cost per click advertising like Adsense, Chitika, etc.

For this to work, you’ll need to know how much money each task brings in. This may be hard to monitor in some cases so just do your best and “guestimate”.

Now, take everything that currently makes you money or will be bringing money in soon. Write each thing down on a piece of paper with plenty of space between each item. (Some things may overlap a bit since certain tasks will directly and indirectly affect other tasks, but that’s OK for now.)

Beside each one, write down how much money it makes per day, per month, per year. Then write down how much you think it can potentially make you per day/month/year.

Once that part is done, go back through each item and list how much time and effort each thing needs to keep bringing in that money. For example, blogging may take you 1 hour a day whereas buying advertising may only take a few hours a month.

Now rate each item on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 is “I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than do this.” and 10 is “This is so freaking fun!”

After you have everything written down, take some time to decide what your top 5 items are. If you didn’t have many to begin with, choose the top 3. Those are the money-making methods you should be focusing on.

That doesn’t mean you need to stop doing the other ones, just don’t spend a lot of time or effort on them right now. You can outsource those tasks to someone else, or wait until your top items are on auto-pilot and you have more time to spend on them.

If they really don’t help your business at all, cut ‘em loose.

Ultimately, you want to be focusing on things that not only help improve your business but are also things you can see yourself continuing to do without them becoming chores you despise doing.

The whole point of working at home is to have freedom. You want the freedom to be able to spend time with your family, and also financial freedom so you’re not always tied to your desk.

To get to that point, you need to periodically analyze your business plan as well as your daily routine and update it accordingly. This exercise will help you do that.

I know from experience that the tasks on this list are great ways to expand your reach, connect with new people, and solidify relationships. This in turn will mean more exposure to your blog/website and more customers/sales.

Why?

Because doing these things helps you stand out from the rest of the crowd.

A lot of marketers like to complain about social networks like Twitter and say how much of a waste of time they are, but if you manage the time you spend on them wisely, they can increase your business exponentially.

This list of “chores” will help you do that so you can continue to focus on maintaining and improving your site.

Quit obsessing about the skills you don’t have and focus on the ones you do have.

I’ve been giving myself a really hard time lately because I can’t do all the things I’d like to. I’m a great piano player – I used to teach it – but I suck butt at playing guitar even though I’d love to play better.

I love to mess around with code on my websites and there are certain aspects of it that I’m pretty good at, but I can’t design a whole website from scratch even though I’d like to.

I love to cook and bake, and making dishes with fresh ingredients is something that makes me really happy, but I couldn’t grow an herb garden if my life depended on it.

So what does this crap have to do with blogging or running a website?

Well, if you’ve been at it for any length of time, you’ll know that it requires an insane amount of work to be even a little bit successful. There are so many aspects to it that it’s impossible for one single person to do all of them well. (Yay for virtual assistants!)

I got to thinking today – which can be a dangerous thing – and wondered why I’m so worried about all the things I can’t do well and decided to focus more on the things that I do very well and will now spend more time doing them even better.

Worrying about the things we can’t do is a colossal waste of time.

If you can’t do something, you have a few options:

• You can hire someone else to do it, or trade services with them.
• Just don’t do it and leave it unfinished. I’m great at that.
• Learn how to do it.

Each solution poses its own problem.

1. Hiring someone can be expensive. Trading services with someone can take up a lot of time.
2. Leaving a task unfinished means loose ends that should be tied up. In a business, this could mean bad things.
3. Learning how to do it yourself can be extremely stressful and time consuming.

I bet you are expecting the perfect workaround at this point. Guess what. I don’t have one. I’m going to cop out and say that you have to choose which solution is the best for you. Ha!

I personally like to do a healthy balance of all three. I’ll get someone else to do the really difficult stuff that I just don’t have the skills/time for. I’ll leave the tasks that aren’t really important or beneficial to my blogs. I’ll figure out how to do the little things that I should probably know how to do anyway which usually saves me time, frustration, and money down the road.

The main thing here is not to have unreasonable expectations. Don’t assume you can do everything by yourself. Don’t feel bad that you can’t do something that others are naturally gifted at.

Instead, pinpoint your strengths and the things you’re great at and use that to your advantage.

Almost any Wordpress blogger has a list of their favorite plugins. I certainly do. Once upon a time, I used to download and install them one at a time. Now, I keep them all in a folder on my computer and install them all at once whenever I need them.

Each time I download a new plugin, I unzip it on my desktop and move the PHP file or the plugin folder into my Wordpress folder in My Documents. You can keep them wherever the heck you want, just make sure they’re all in one folder and easy to access.

Now when you install a new Wordpress blog, just open up your FTP program, navigate to your plugins folder on your server, click and drag all your plugins into your plugins folder and BLAM-O! Sit back and relax while they transfer. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Once they’re all uploaded to your server, head to your plugins page in your Wordpress dashboard and activate them all using the “Bulk Actions” feature. Wordpress 2.7 versions and up also come with the handy “Automatically Upgrade” option which is a huge time saver as well.

If you have a finickity theme and your blog implodes after adding all your plugins, you’ll have to deactivate them and then activate them one at a time to figure out which plugin is messing with your stuff. Hopefully this doesn’t happen as this can be a serious pain in the ass. Most of the time though, this works perfectly.

Happy Wordpressing!

I’ve picked up a few things over the years that helps me balance work and family (and “me time”). I have to admit that I don’t always practice what I preach but I do my best and it really does work when you manage to stay focused.

JUST DO IT

How many times have you had a great idea only to let it die because you waited too long to put it into action? Having that great idea isn’t enough. Writing it down on paper isn’t enough. You need to start acting on it right away.

• If you want to start a new site, start by buying the domain name right away.
• If you want to write an ebook, sit down with a pen and paper and create an outline.
• If you want to create an email course, put up a subscribe form and get crackin’ on the first lesson.

Just do it! Once you start that first step, continue on and keep making steps, even if they’re baby steps.

Something John Reese said in his blog post How To Get Everything You Want in 24 Hours really struck a chord with me.

“You must do something every single day towards accomplishing your goal. It doesn’t matter how big or how small this effort has to be. It just has to be something.”

That is a great post to read if you have trouble taking action. I even printed that quote out and have it by my computer at all times. Every time I look at it I want to work!

END DISTRACTIONS

Who doesn’t love Twitter? Even though Twitter can be a great tool for building contacts, relationship and traffic, it can also be a huge time suck. Instant messaging, email, reading RSS feeds – all those things can consume a huge amount of time without you realizing it.

Sometimes I just have to turn all those things off if I want to get any work done. Other times, I allow myself a certain amount of time to use them. If you want to get really serious, you can time yourself to see just how much time you spend on things that aren’t benefiting your business. SlimTimer works perfectly for me. Scary how much time you lose to certain things each day!

ONE THING AT A TIME

I can’t tell you how many text files I have on my computer of articles/blog posts/ebooks I’ve started writing but didn’t finish. I’ve been in the process of cleaning them all up and I’ve achieved a lot in the past few weeks but I’ve implemented a few “rules” for myself to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand again.

I keep my computer desktop completely clean except for one folder, “To Do”. When I start a new project, I save it to my desktop. I will not allow myself to put it into my To Do folder until it’s complete. When it is complete, I rename the file to add “done” at the end. Then when I go to publish new content, I have all my “done” files in my To Do folder.

This works for me because I despise clutter and I can’t stand icons on my desktop. I’m a bit strange that way. I can’t stand anything on my counter tops either and fridge magnets are a huge no-no in my house. Poo on clutter, including half-finished text files all over my desktop.

Sometimes it’s hard to finish a project while you’re working on it because you come up with even more ideas while you’re in the process. This gets overwhelming and leads to complete burn-out so I’ve trained myself not to think about anything else while I’m working on something.

KEEP A SCHEDULE

Whether your kids are still at home with you or are going to school during the day, you need some kind of schedule or routine. My routine is always changing and needs to be very versatile. My kids are still young and most of my time is devoted to them so I might have a few months in a row where I get up early and work before they wake up, then I might have a few months where I work after they go to bed.

If you’re just flying by the seat of your pants, you should consider adding some kind of structure into your day. Starting a schedule for myself has added to my productivity immensely.

I’ve tried a lot of online tools like Google Calendar to keep a schedule, but I always come back to my handy dandy notebook. I love my daily planner and I would probably cry like a little girl if I lost it. A lot of WAHMs like to use Remember The Milk which can actually be used with Google Calendar so it’s worth checking out if you’re in need of a little routine-making action.

CONCLUSION

We’re all different. We all have different situations at home and we all have different goals and tasks that need to be accomplished every day.

It’s important to make the best of your time so that you can find a healthy balance for you and your family. Nobody said being a work at home mom was easy, but it can be very rewarding. The trick is to find what works for you.

If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you have those days when you have no clue what day of the week it is, let alone what time of day it is. Men With Pens have some fixes for us crazy time-challenged foo’s.

I mentioned in my Google Alerts post about deep-linking to your blog posts when commenting on other blogs, but Jenstar has another clever way of gaining pageviews and getting some use out of older posts.

Google Analytics is a very powerful program to have under your belt but it can be pretty confusing. It’s so much more than just a traffic stat program and it has a lot of features. Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing has a short video that I found really helpful. (By the way, Web Marketing For Dummies – which he co-authored – is available so check it out.)

And because it’s me birthday and it happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d leave you with a post from the Ezine Articles blog that has a few interesting facts about St. Patty’s day that I didn’t know before.

Now I’m off to paint my face green and eat a bunch of green birthday cake after guzzling some green beer.

One of the tools I’ve been using will have to take most of that credit – WampServer. I’m not exactly sure what took me so long to download this, but I’m almost sick to my stomach when I think about how much time I’ve wasted before installing it.

This handy dandy little program is perfect for anyone who customizes Wordpress themes. I’m sure there are lots of other methods but this one works perfectly for me, and it’s allowed me to learn CSS much more quickly than before. Did I mention that WampServer is free?

So what does WampServer do?

Let’s say you want to spruce up your Wordpress theme a little bit, or put up a brand new theme, but you don’t want all your visitors to see any changes (or mistakes) you’ve made until you’re finished. Installing WampServer allows you to use your computer like a server so you can install Wordpress locally. You can make all the changes you want and nobody will ever see. When you’re done, just copy the code and paste over your existing Wordpress files on your regular server.

This is also a great way to mess around with some code to see what does what. Delete some code, save the file, refresh your page, and see what happened. Now you know what that chunk of CSS you just deleted was for. If it was something slightly important, just overwrite the file with the original one you’ve smartly kept on backup.

After years of messing around with CSS, this is hands down the best method I’ve used to figure out just what the hell I’m doing – and in such a short amount of time. Not to mention the fact that I can customize a Wordpress theme in a fraction of the time it used to take me. There’s gold in that thar WampServer.

Something else that always happens to me over the holidays is I seem to lose my groove. My work groove that is.

Even though I have done quite a bit of work in the past few days behind the scenes, I haven’t done as much as I wanted to.

That’s why I’m glad I read this post at John Reese’s blog. He doesn’t update often, but when he does it’s always a worthy read. He always makes me stop and think which ends up alternating my train of thought indefinitely (and in a positive way I might add).

I’m horrible for putting things off until the last minute, or constantly telling myself “I’ll do it tomorrow”, but after this morning, I think things will be changing.

If you’re a big procrastinator like me, you’ll definitely want to read that post.

Something else you’ll want to do is have a clear idea in your head about your goals for 2009. In fact, you should write them down and keep them somewhere accessible – somewhere you’ll be looking at frequently. I plan on using one of my awesome multi-colored funky girly notebooks to store my 2009 goals in and I’ll be keeping it right beside my computer on my desk so that I never forget.

I’ll also be creating a plan to help me reach each of my goals along with a reasonable yet challenging timeline. I want 2009 to be my best year yet and I’ve been a busy little beaver acquiring all the tools and knowledge need to accomplish that. I would love for you to make 2009 your best year as well.

Let’s kick some recession ass!

Because of this, it’s important to make sure you break up that time with bursts of activity every now and then which will:

1. Ease the monotony of work and keep you from turning into a zombie
2. Clear your head so you can come back with a fresh look on things
3. Keep your circulation flowing, calories burning, and muscles working

That’s just naming a few reasons. I also find that I’m more productive this way, both online and in the house. My kids happily take up most of my time (which is why I always wanted to work from home) so I usually don’t have a problem finding reasons to get away from the computer.

But when one is napping and the other is busy drawing me Harry Potter pictures – which can literally take hours – I have to remind myself to get up at frequent intervals. If I don’t, my back and legs get sore and my productivity goes way down.

I like to break up long stretches of work by doing a load of laundry, cleaning up the kitchen, taking out the garbage, etc. Sounds fun, I know.

I don’t let myself watch TV or do any other leisure activities until my “To Do” list is finished, plus I find that most of those activities are just sucking my energy dry and will leave me not wanting to return to my work.

So if you’re the type to sit until it’s all done, then get up while hearing the groan and creaking of your bones, blinking and looking around like you’re in an unfamiliar place, it might be time to add some interval training.

Get off your butt at least once an hour and do something! You may very well see an improvement in both your health, and your work.