When you work at home, you tend to work amid clutter, especially if you have children. It is just about impossible to keep little hands from depositing stuffed animals in your lap, half-eaten crackers on your desk and dragging all manner of cars and coloring books into the office to leave laying around on the floor!

Is there any way to stop the invasion of mess? Once your children are old enough to understand, you can start trying to train them to keep their toys in the toy area (a corner of the living room or in their rooms), but in general, you probably won’t be able to halt the inflow of things!

Hope is not lost, however. There are methods to control the clutter and keep it from taking over your desk. One such way is to have a bulletin board beside your computer. Here, any and all artwork that is brought in can be stuck up immediately and admired, leaving kids happy and you without mounds of papers on your desk.

Having a basket is handy for all those extra toys. A nice big laundry basket is best if you have either two or more children or a LOT of toys! Keep it in a corner near your desk and when those stuffed animals and cars start to pile up around your feet, toss them all into the basket for putting away later. This doesn’t eliminate the mess, but it does keep it contained. The basket can be used for everything from books and Barbies to weird stones and empty tissue boxes that somehow find their way onto your lap.

If you stick to a small desk that is just big enough for your computer, you will also find that your kids will have a harder time loading it up with things (although they will still try!). Clear everything out of the office area each night, even if that just means putting it all into a box to deal with tomorrow. There’s nothing worse than sitting down in a disaster area in the morning, it just ruins any motivation you might have had!

Feel free to add your clutter control tips here, please! We could all use more ideas!

Are you trying to make money online? Did you know that the majority of people earn less than $100 a year through internet ventures? I was a bit disappointed to hear that, but luckily I’ve already earned over that through writing. However, I thought I’d share a cool new challenge with my readers, presented by Just Make Money Online.

The challenge is this: to earn $100 in an online project by the end of 2007. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? The challenge actually started in January, but I think most people will be able to make it easily enough by the end of the year. If you are interested in participating, all you have to do is post your intentions on your blog, choose a project and then go leave a comment on Just Make Money Online so you can be added to the $100 Challenge list.

My project is BUM Marketing, which I just learned about yesterday. The report is very informative and there is also a tutorial video. The best part is . . . it’s free! You can learn all about the marketing strategy of Travis Sago completely free. So, I’m going to attempt to earn $100 (hopefully more) through this project. I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes.

Usually it is the opposite, you fit your schedule to your work, but not if you work from home! While some moms are very good at shutting their office door, blocking out the screams from fighting siblings in the next room, and buckling down to work, we are not all that lucky.

For one, some of us don’t have a separate office! That means we can be interrupted at any point for any reason. And in part, that’s why you work from home, right? To see more of your kids? But it can be frustrating at times. I have found that the best way to manage to get work done is to fit the work to the schedule.

This is particularly true since I have a toddler who doesn’t quite get that Mommy has to work when he wants a story! Kind of difficult to explain what a deadline is to a 16 month old! Your kids will have their own quirks and needs throughout the day and since they tend to be pretty predictable (happy in the morning, major meltdown an hour before bed), you can figure out how to work around them.

For example, when my son is up and running around in the morning (happiest time of day), I do things like submit my blog and website to directories, check my emails, download free ebooks from giveaway sites, etc. Things that don’t require a lot of attention. That allows me to stop and play for a couple of minutes or read him a story from time to time without really interrupting anything. Then, during his nap, I get really productive and write as many articles as possible. The rest of the day is pretty much a goner, unless my husband is able to watch my son. Then at night, once he is in bed and supper is out of the way, I write my blog posts, more articles and do some reading up on SEO techniques and research money earning sites.

You need to adjust your work schedule to mesh with your family schedule. For those of you with older kids, this will include car pooling and soccer games, or just taking time to listen to your teen on the rare occasion that she actually wants to talk to you! The point is, if you are working from home, you can’t really expect everything to work like it would in the office, despite what the pros say!

So, enjoy these moments while your kids are still little and don’t worry about getting one or two things less done per day. If it means I can get in some extra cuddle time with my growing-up-too-fast little boy, I don’t mind dropping a couple of articles off my agenda!

If you are at all like me (and a zillion other bloggers), you probably find yourself reading a lot of other blogs. And, like me, find yourself overwhelmed with the number of links piling up in your Favorites file. Luckily, Google has come up with a very handy solution for all this.

The Google Reader allows you to subscribe to feeds very easily and have them all displayed on one page. You can sort all the blogs you subscribe to into folders and read them at your leisure. The greatest part about this is that you can see at a glance which blogs have new posts. No more loading pages only to find that there is nothing new posted!

After realizing that my reading blog list is entirely too long, I spent this evening subscribing to feeds and setting up folders so I am completely organized and ready to read. Now the only problem is to find time to actually read all the blogs that are now plugged into my Google Reader!

If you want to organize your blog reading list as well, check out the Google Reader.

Well, I just learned about this Thursday 13 meme that has apparently been going on for 90 weeks now (shows how new to the blogosphere I am!) and decided to participate. Since my second son is due this coming week, I thought I’d come up with thirteen things to do once he is born. Here goes:

1. Buy new jeans, I’m so sick of my two pairs of maternity pants! I want to look good again.
2. Stop drinking Pepsi. I am a bit of an addict and need it right now to get through the last weary weeks of pregnancy with a 16 month old at my feet.
3. Start cooking every night. I’ve been hopelessly lazy about cooking lately.
4. Get a family portrait. Seems like the right time to do it!
5. Reiniciate contact with my parents so they can see photos of their newest grandson.
6. Write a whole bunch of articles on newborns, since I’ll be back in the saddle!
7. Throw away my flip flops, I’ve lived in them for the past three months because my feet are so swollen.
8. Stop forgetting things and blaming it on the pregnancy!
9. Get my website in order and start bringing in orders.
10. Start eating healthier. I won’t have the pregnancy to blame for any weight gain.
11. Breastfeed. I missed out on that the first time around since my son spent time in the hospital.
12. Take my older son out to the park. We haven’t gone out in ages because I’m so fat and waddly and can’t really carry him anymore.
13. Get in shape. No more babies for this body! I want to get in shape again.

Well, that’s my Thirteen Things. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought. If you want to learn more about this meme, check out Thursday Thirteen.