When I made the decision over three years ago to become self-employed and work from home I have to confess it was on a bit of a whim.

(I know, that doesn’t sound like me does it??)

It was inspired partly by boredom and the desire for a new challenge*, alongside the need, as a single parent, for more flexibility. ‘I know what I’ll do,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll become a freelance journalist! That’ll be fun’.

I had no money, no experience and no training, but I did have enthusiasm, a desk I hastily bought from ebay, and an extensive collection of stationery items. What more did I need?

Over the next few weeks I spent many a happy hour perusing the magazines in WHSmiths and organising my pens into colour order and before long I had carved out what one could almost describe as a career. If by career you meant ‘bizarre collection of jobs with no real plan for the future’. Job done. Or in my case, very nearly done, possibly tomorrow.

"Pens in colour order"

Ooh, pretty…

My difficulty, in working from home, comes from my apparent ability to be distracted by absolutely anything vaguely shiny or more interesting than what I’m currently doing. When you work from home, it’s amazing how alluring the washing up can become when you’ve got a copywriting deadline on the horizon. ‘Right,’ I will say to myself at 9am, ‘time to get cracking.’ And then I’ll wander off to make a cup of tea.

This year though will be different. (Aren’t they all?)

This year I’m going to try really, really hard to work more efficiently. Really truly honestly I am. (At the same time as losing weight, getting fit and reading the news more often obviously). This is my plan, my New Year resolutions as a work at home mum:

  1. If I am in the middle of doing something, just do that thing. It sounds obvious, but the number of times I go looking for an attachment, get distracted by twitter, start writing a blog post, bake a cake, and then come back two hours later to find I was in the middle of sending an email all along is just ridiculous.**
  2. Be stricter with my hours. Yes it’s lovely having the flexibility of being self-employed, but I need to focus on working the key hours when children are at school and then enjoying my time off without feeling guilty.
  3. Not check my emails and twitter every 27 seconds fearing that something Incredible And Amazing is going to be happening that I’m going to miss. Seriously, get over yourself woman, your life really isn’t that interesting.
  4. Make more of an effort to create a long-term plan. This is going to be a toughie as I have a real aversion to planning ahead. What if I change my mind? What if something else, something better or shinier comes along? Without long-term planning though it is all too easy to just say ‘yes’ randomly to any offers of work without thinking about how they contribute to your career objectives. Or so I’ve heard.

And that’s it. This time next year and all that.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

*Not to mention a rather disastrous work fling

**It is worth noting that in the middle of writing this post I left to research and buy business insurance, to look at a recipe book and to eat an apple. You see my problem.

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Friday at last! This week has been a varied one to say the least. As well as being a single mum to two gorgeous girls, I also juggle three home based jobs – writing, marketing and fundraising. Add to this my obsession with checking my emails and blog stats and a chronic inability to concentrate properly on anything for more than five minutes at a time, and I often find my weeks become a jumble of writing features, lurking on forums and trying to flog baby towels.

To illustrate my point and to try and give myself a sense of having achieved something, I thought I would write a brief summary of what I’ve been up to this week workwise. Picture me doing the following, whilst of course at the same time blogging, emailing and maintaining some kind of relationship with my family:

Monday: Writing day today. Wrote and filed a feature on green baby products for The Source and a piece on breastfeeding and friendship for The Green Parent. Did you know that oxytocin, the hormone that causes the let down reflex, has been shown to increase levels of trust in humans, making the friendships you form while breastfeeding deeper and longer lasting? Well now you do.

Tuesday: Today I was very excited as I went out of the house for a meeting with real people. I wore a dress and everything. I am Marketing Manager for Cuddledry (remember them from Dragons’s Den?) and we were planning a revamp of the website. I came up with a fiendish plan for a relaunch of our blog with a month of guest Mummy Blogging – please get in touch if you would like to contribute!

Wednesday: Not a productive start to Wednesday. After dropping Belle off at school I felt a little bit overwhelmed and, unable to face returning to my empty house, I walked around for a bit trying not to cry until the snow made my feet too cold. However, after an hour or so of mild panic and several cups of tea, I managed to write a feature on food labelling for The Spark. In the evening I watched Avatar and felt rather silly wearing 3D specs over my ordinary glasses.

Thursday: Hmmm… what did I actually do on Thursday? …consults work book… Ah yes, I was in baby towel mode today, finding Mummy Bloggers for my blogging month – I have lots already, hoorah! – and trying to find a celebrity parent to be a judge for our Baby Bubble Beard competition. When I needed something non-towel related I pitched a few feature ideas, mooched about on facebook and ate some of the leftover Christmas chocolates.

Friday: This morning I had another meeting away from home (aren’t I the social animal this week?) with my two lovely colleagues from my charity consultancy. Next week we are pitching to run a capital appeal for the building of a new community hall, so we met to discuss our proposal and plan our pitch. And I had a lovely scrambled egg and smoked salmon breakfast. Yum. After a very successful visit to the St Margaret’s Hospice shop, where I bought a Next suit for £4, I returned home to write the appeal proposal, recruit some more bloggers, try and woo Dr Miriam Stoppard and think up marketing ploys for the women’s news website I have recently become involved in. Oh, and I just ate a bowl of porridge. Rock and roll.

Time for a little sit down.

Flickr image by Helico

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This is me.

My name is Jo. I am a single mother to two daughters, aged seven and 14, and I work at home in a variety of different hats – mostly at the moment a wooly one, as I am too tight environmentally aware to put the heating on during the day for just me.

My life is a weird combination of hectic and dull, complicated yet often boring. It’s a hard mix to bear sometimes and without another adult in the house to sound off at, I often find by bedtime that my mind is a swirling swamp of concerns, tasks for the next day and random thoughts about life, parenthood and the plot details of Flash Forward.

This blog is going to be my silent partner, the husband I have never had, the substitute for the man who would undoubtedly be subject to my daily musings and rantings, were he here to listen to them. This will also be the place I go to ask myself for advice. As a single parent, you have no one to consult – no one to share the responsibilities of decision-making. I am only young, I haven’t had any training for this, and sometimes I’m not sure of the right thing to do. When is it ok for a girl to have her ears pierced? I randomly settled on nine as a suitable age, based on absolutely nothing at all, but it would have been nice to have a second opinion. At what age is it ok for my teenager to have boys at her sleepovers? I really didn’t know the answer to this one and it feels wrong that I am expected to come up with sensible solutions to these kind of things all by myself.

I find the act a writing a cathartic one – it helps to clear my mind and work through problems. Perhaps by sharing any questions with my blog I will become the wise and sensible mother I have always wanted to be, rather than stumbling blindly from one issue to another.

Entwined with the day-to-day tedium that is parenting, I am searching for The One. My rational side knows he doesn’t exist, which does make the search frustrating and disappointing sometimes, but my supressed romantic side won’t let it go. Not surprisingly, as a work at home single mum my opportunities for meeting eligible bachelors are limited. It could be a long search…

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