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March 31, 2021

How to Outsource Like a Boss for Home and Work

Have you ever looked at your to-do list and realized you need about 30 hours to accomplish everything you outlined as critical for the day? If so, you aren’t alone. Caring for a family and working are both hugely satisfying undertakings. But, let’s face it, it’s also a tremendous amount of work. 

Here’s some good news–you don’t need to tackle it alone. By strategically outsourcing some tasks, you can find more time and energy to put toward the people and projects that mean the most to you. Here’s a round up of the tasks–work and personal–that are great candidates for outsourcing.

Business Tasks

When you run a small business, it’s tempting to want to do it all. You became an entrepreneur because you’re motivated and hardworking.This combination makes it tough to let go of the reins, even for a task you don’t enjoy or could easily outsource. It helps to have a framework for considering what tasks/jobs make sense for outsourcing. When considering outsourcing, think about:

  • What are you great at doing?
  • What do you like to do?
  • Where would you like to grow professionally?

If a task doesn’t fall into one of those categories, it’s a good candidate for outsourcing. 

 

Quickly Find Virtual Help 

When you are looking for outsourcing help for a business task, consider a virtual team member. With remote employees, you don’t need to provide office space and you aren’t limited by geography. You can find and hire a team member who’s located anywhere with good internet access. 

Using a platform like HireMyMom is a great way to source qualified candidates who are specifically looking for remote work. You can save time and money by turning to a site dedicated to connecting driven mom professionals with small businesses. 

If the prospect of a nationwide search daunts you, consider our concierge service to help reduce the amount of leg work you need to do. HireMyMom’s Concierge service was created for busy entrepreneurs and small business owners, like you, who need to hire help but don’t have the time or desire to go through the time-consuming process. With our full service Concierge service, our HR Specialists will do it all for you start to finish and present you with the top candidate(s). 

 

Build a Remote Team 

Here’s a list of jobs that are often outsourced:

  • Bookkeeping
  • Social Media management
  • Graphic Design
  • Writing/Editing
  • Marketing/Email Marketing
  • Project Management
  • Customer Service
  • Facebook Ad Manager
  • Online Business Manager
  • Virtual Assistant (VA)

 

Consider a Virtual Assistant

In some cases, a virtual assistant (VA) may be the right fit for you. A VA can take care of many tasks, including email response, appointment setting, travel planning, and calendar management. You can find a general VA, who does a wide variety of tasks or one with a speciality in your industry or need. 

 

Personal Tasks

Personal tasks can easily add up and cause stress, making it more difficult to manage the day-to-day workings of life. What’s more, many of them are urgent and important and time sensitive. (For example, dinner must be served every night.) Tasks that can wait tend to grow in time commitment and urgency if you put them off. (I’m looking at you, piles of dirty laundry.) Here are some ideas to help relieve some of the steam:

 

Put Meal Prep and Grocery Shopping on Auto Pilot

Planning, serving and cleaning up multiple meals a day takes a huge time investment. (Especially if your whole family is home all the time.) But outsourcing some meal-prep tasks can make every day easier.

  •  A weekly menu hanging on the fridge takes the guesswork out of each meal. If you don’t enjoy menu planning or just need a break from it, consider using an online meal planning service. Several are available and they allow you to quickly select a week’s worth of meals based on your health goals, family preferences, and budget. Once you select your meals, you can automatically create a shopping list for the meals selected.
  •  We all need groceries every week (sometimes more). But driving to the store to collect them is a major time commitment. You can regain that time by signing up for grocery delivery. Several companies such as Amazon Fresh, Peapod, Shipt, and Instacart, are ready to make it easier for you to fill your pantry. 

While it takes some time to initially get set up with these services, it’s well worth the initial time investment. Chances are you make many of the same purchases each week, so many items will stay on your list for each order. You can even use a menu planner that automatically creates a grocery list and sends it to your preferred delivery service. 

  • If you don’t have grocery delivery available locally, consider the pick up service offered by many large grocery store chains. You submit your order online, pull up at the appointed time, and drive off with a car full of groceries. Both pick up and delivery help you save money by limiting impulse purchases.

Cut Down on Cooking

There are several ways to lighten the cooking load through outsourcing. Consider:

  • Sharing the load by finding four like-minded families and forming a cooking co-op. Each family makes four, family-sized servings of one dish. Meet to swap meals and go home knowing that you have five homemade dinners ready to roll–even though you only had to make one. Keep your circle of chefs small until the COVID-19 situation is resolved.
  • Ordering a meal delivery kit to take away the prepping, planning and chopping.
  • Finding a local chef who offers pre-prepped meals for pick up or delivery. 

 

Find Help with Child Care

You choose to work at home to spend more time with your kids and avoid the expense and hassle of day care. But, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from some help with the kids. Finding a good babysitter, even if it’s only for a few hours a week, can really change the flow of your day. Having a few hours set aside without interruption makes it easier to power through your work. Also, depending on the age of your kids, the sitter can help with other tasks, such as:

  • Driving a carpool route for you.
  • Running errands with your kids–think the post office or picking up dry cleaning. This gives you a few hours of peace and quiet, keeps the kids busy, and eliminates tasks from your to-do list.
  • Working with the kids to go through their toys or books to find things they have outgrown.
  • Picking up the stray items you forgot to add to your online grocery order.
  • Walking the dog or other pet care needs.
  • Putting laundry away.
  • Supervising homework/online school instruction.

 

Clean with Ease

Everyone loves a clean house, but the work to get it sparkling can take all day. The easiest way to keep the house spic and span is to hire a cleaning service. If that’s not practical based on your budget or circumstances, these ideas can help lighten the load:

  • Buy a Roomba or other automatic vacuum or mop so you wake up to fresh floors every morning.
  • Drop your dirty laundry off at the laundromat for wash and fold service each week. This frees up an enormous amount of time and cuts down on the anxiety created by looking at baskets full of clothes–some clean, some dirty, and inevitably, one that’s mixed between clean and dirty clothes. 
  • Hire a service for big jobs that can really nag at you. For example, window washing or other seasonal jobs.

 

Reduce Yard Work

Many people find yard work relaxing, but elements of it can be outsourced to free you up to focus on the things you like most. For example, mowing and weeding are good candidates to outsource. With that out of the way, you are free to focus on tending to flowers or other things that truly bring you joy.

 

Don’t Wait to Reclaim Your Time

Outsourcing tasks is a great way to focus your time and energy on the things that matter most to you. Don’t delay–identify the things that someone else could do for you and start enjoying the increased time and energy it provides. 

Tell us what you’ve outsourced and how it changed the game for you.

 

 

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December 14, 2020

Working Remotely Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely

Working from home has many advantages. It has given businesses the opportunity to remain operational throughout these tough times and its kept employees working. 

It’s important to build and maintain relationships while working remotely and avoid isolation that can occur, especially for extroverted individuals who are experiencing a remote work environment for the first time.

In this article, we highlight some of the best ways to stay connected.

Effective Communication

The key to running any successful business is through effective communication. Depending on where you are in the world, some forms of communication will work better than others (especially where there are time zone differences).

Speaking on the phone works if you’re in transit and can’t get in front of your computer but for the most part, using methods of communication that allow for screen sharing are more effective. Video conference software can satisfy this form of communication. The most commonly used video conference software include Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. 

The more video conference calls you can have in a week the better because it can prevent any miscommunication with your team, delays in productivity, and it also provides you with socialization. For ongoing communication throughout the day, chatroom software can be very useful.  You can use chatroom software to streamline workflow, share files, manage projects, and reach both clients and team members easily.

An application called “Slack” is one of the most popular choices for this purpose but there are some alternatives that have been receiving some great reviews too such as Fleep, Flock and Chanty. 

 

Communication Software For Your Phone

These days it seems there’s just no escaping your phone. Most people have their phones with them at all times throughout the day so they can be more available to their clients and/or coworkers. 

There are some really great apps that can help you communicate better and keep your personal and business communications apart. 

A lot of businesses use an app called Whatsapp because of its versatility. It offers texting, video chat, document, and image sharing, and can be accessed from almost anywhere in the world with no long-distance fees. 

 

Creating a Work-Life Balance

Sometimes you can lose track of the day and with added household responsibilities on top, it can feel like mission impossible to find that balance between work and play.  (We have a great resource library to help you find balance here.)

There are many ways you can incorporate socialization into your workday whether you’re grabbing breakfast with a friend, going for a walk with a neighbor, or having coffee with your co-worker, it’s important to make time to step outside your remote workplace bubble.

You can use your break time to check in with friends and family via social media channels like Facebook and you can also join an online community group which can be a great form of support while helping you form new relationships at the same time. 

 

Other ways to connect

HireMyMom has a great online community with the goal to encourage, inspire, support, and grow each other. For more information, you can visit our community page here.

 

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August 26, 2019

Parenting vs Working: How to Create Work-Life Balance in Your Home-Based Business

Guest Post by Justin Chapman

Becoming a Virtual Assistant is often a choice made by parents who never want to miss the big moments in their children’s lives. One of the biggest struggles parents will face as a virtual professional is work-life balance. Often, as a Virtual Assistant or Virtual Professional, when you have a home office, you can easily get caught up working long hours because of your focus. As a professional, you want to get work done and saying to yourself “just another 10 minutes”, can quickly turn into another two hours. Conversations with your spouse can quickly turn into conversations about your new client or the project you are working on. Following the steps below can help you create work-life balance in your home-based business.

Schedule Your Hours

Flexibility in your hours is an attractive piece of becoming an at-home professional, but sometimes in that, you have to make sacrifices. These sacrifices can be made in your personal or professional life. If you have a tight deadline, you may have to sacrifice watching your child’s soccer game. If you can’t miss your mother’s birthday, then a couple of hours of work may have to be done early one morning. Knowing your schedule at least a week in advance will make you more productive.

Whether you are taking care of children, or visiting your parents, entrepreneurs will always have their business in the back of their minds. Having a schedule will create work-life balance. A schedule assists in reducing stress; knowing that you have eight uninterrupted hours tomorrow to get work done allows you to enjoy the night before with family or friends. Make sure you take advantage of a schedule, and put as much as you possibly can in it.

Design a Home Office

If you do not have a spare office with a door, you do not have to be a contractor to build one. Purchasing “hush panels” or office boards to section off even a small work area can make a massive difference. Many Virtual Assistants set up a computer in a multi-purpose room. It is important to have that room act as an office during your working hours, or to have your station sectioned off from the room.

Conversations about work need to happen in your office, even with your spouse. Don’t allow work-talk to take over every conversation in the house. If you want advice from your spouse or a friend on a project you are working on, bring them into your office. Ask questions where you can take notes or show them what you have created already. Practicing this will build a sense of separation and create work-life balance.

Get Organized and Set Goals

This is one of the best tips to help you answer the question: how to create work-life balance in your home-based business. If you have ever taken any at-home post-secondary courses, such as CanScribe’s Virtual Assistant Program, you know how important setting goals can be. When you have a project, you have one ultimate goal: complete the project.

Creating smaller goals will help you complete the project effectively. It can also help you schedule your time around your family. Make sure you know what goals you have and how long each task will take. Rather than just “doing work”, you are working effiectively and not wasting time. Similar to knowing your schedule, you are able to reduce stress and enjoy time with your family and friends because you know what needs to be done, how long it will take, and when you are working on it.

Creating a work-life balance is important to success both as a family member, and as a professional. Scheduling your hours, building an office, and keeping organized can help become successful at both. Focus on your family while keeping attention on your work priorities. These tips help show you how to create work-life balance in your home-based business.

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June 18, 2018 0 Comments

5 Tips for Work Life Balance

 

We often hear of work life balance, but how do we achieve it?  Bridging the gap between work, family, relaxation and social time is a challenge in our busy world, but it’s crucial to quality of life.

According to Small Business Trends, “66 percent of full-time employees say they don’t strongly believe they have a work-life balance,” which is a huge figure.  It’s important that we take the time to find a balance for better health and happiness.

What’s important?

The first step to work life balance is establishing what that looks like for you, along with what’s important in your life.  If you say it’s family but spend all your time working, it’s time to reevaluate your priorities. If you’re truly in a time period when getting ahead at work is crucial, you may have less time for family and friends.

Finding a balance starts with what’s ideal for you.  Is it important for you to have a few hours at night to do nothing?  Do you need to be done working at a certain time to get to your child’s game?  Lay out a perfect week that allows you to include those things that are non-negotiable.

Time management

For work life balance to be successful, you must manage your time! It’s easy to get distracted during work and outside of work, and that cuts down on the time you have left for you.  Break down your work tasks by time, and always leave room for breaks and downtime.

When you know where your time is going, you’re better able to re-adjust as needed.  Take inventory of where your time is spent, and take steps to rearrange some things if needed.

Stay social

So you don’t always feel like you’re in work mode, staying social is key! Make time for your friends and family, even if work is your current priority.  You can still take some time out of your days or weeks to see friends and family.

This is a great way to recharge your batteries, see where your priorities lie, and strengthen relationships.  It’s almost always known that we feel better after interacting with those we love! Make time for this – work will be there when you return.  When you get time away from work, you come back more refreshed and ready to do a better job.

Turn it off

Especially on weekends, it’s important to turn off electronics! Weekends should mostly be reserved for fun, relaxation, and recharging.  Your phone and computer can be used personally, but try not to get too involved with anything with work. It’s important for the brain to shut down for a while and not focus on work.  

It gets tiring for your brain and body to look at a screen constantly, and you seriously blur the lines between work and play when you end up working all weekend, even if it’s just through your computer.

Do your best to make weekends work technology free! Again, you’ll come back feeling ready to tackle your tasks on Monday if you didn’t spend the whole weekend working.

Remember downtime

Downtime is so important! Doing fun things with your friends and family is also crucial and valid, but spending time relaxing is very important to quality of life.

Whether you enjoy spa days, a leisurely walk, or just some time lounging by a pool, it’s important to have downtime where nothing is on the agenda.  We live in a very structured, scheduled world, and while that’s great for productivity, or figuring out where your time is, eventually you have to shut that off for a while.

 

You can even look at your schedule early in the week and ensure that you’ve carved out some time to do absolutely nothing!

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April 24, 2017 0 Comments

5 Tips for Better Work-Life Balance

We all hear about the elusive “work-life balance” concept.  It’s the place where our careers and personal lives become balanced.  We don’t feel overworked, we have enough time for friends and family, and so on.  While this is a great concept in theory, and one we should strive for, it can be quite difficult to make it happen.

Since reducing stress and making more time for those things that are important to you is truly crucial, read along for some of our best tips in increasing your work-life balance, and hopefully, your quality of life.

Declare your priorities

When you figure out what’s most important in your life, it becomes easier to figure out where to place your time.  If you’re working very hard to advance your career, perhaps that’s your priority for the next six months.  On the other hand, if you’ve been pulling 60 hour weeks and your priority is family time, you may have to re-evaluate a bit.  Everyone will have different priorities, and they will often change depending on the season of your life.

To start to create that feeling of satisfaction and balance in your life, start by examining priorities and place more of your time there.

Take time for yourself

It’s important to unplug when you aren’t in “work” mode! And it should be noted that work mode should not be 24/7.  This can be difficult as work from home moms, but it’s a necessity in gaining balance.

Take time for yourself: schedule something exciting, keep weekends for friends, family, errands, and fun, and generally create space for the good things in life.  Yes, work is important and a huge part of our lives, but if that’s all you do, you’ll quickly feel out of balance.  Don’t feel guilty about making yourself a priority; you’ll be a better mom, friend, and employee for it!

Manage your time

Are you spending more time than you thought on work tasks?  Keep track of your time for a while – both business and personal.  Once you see some patterns forming, create a solid schedule.  This will allow you to keep things in order and allow you to see where your free time is.  WHen you know where you’re spending too much (or not enough) time, you can readjust.

A lot of the work of establishing a solid work-life balance is in seeing where your time is going.  If you don’t keep track for a while, how will you know?  Put in some of the effort in the beginning and you can truly see where your time is being spent.

Make time for fun

For most people, a large part of work-life balance will include relaxation, family and friends.  You still have to have fun, even if your current priority is work or career advancement. It’s crucial to stay social, especially if you work from home.  Keep those social appointments and work them into your busy schedule whenever possible!

Take breaks

It’s important to stick to your guns regarding vacations, time off, and breaks.   Vacations and breaks don’t need to be elaborate, but there needs to be a definitive break from work on a consistent basis.

In our current culture, it’s easy to put these things off because so much needs to be done.  Fortunately, these things will still be there when you return! This isn’t to say that a great work ethic isn’t a wonderful thing, but too much of anything isn’t useful.

Work towards a balanced sense of work and life by following the tips above.  When you see where your time is going, focus on your priorities, and stay committed to what’s best for you, you’ll find these things are much more balanced in your life.

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December 3, 2014 0 Comments

A Trio of Skills Teens Can Teach Themselves

As a work-at-home mom, you figuratively have your feet in two different worlds. Although you certainly stay busy with work and projects in your home office, you also understand the life of a homemaker. While you probably have enjoyed having a flexible schedule that has allowed you to do things like volunteer in your kids’ schools and work around them at least part of the time, you also recognize that your kids are now teenagers, and it’s time to cut the proverbial apron strings a bit. But where do you find these life skills for teens?

Fear not, thanks to the power of the Internet, it is more than possible to encourage your teens to take the reins and teach themselves some needed skills. In addition to showing them the value of self-reliance and independence, encouraging your teens to learn things on their own will also teach them that they don’t always need mom to lead them through every new experience. Consider the following skills that teens can handle on their own — at least part of the time:

Basic Cleaning

Although it might be hard to fathom, your teens will someday be on their own. To help prepare them for life in their future apartments — and frankly, to take some of the housecleaning burdens off of you now — it’s a great idea to teach teens to handle some basic cleaning duties. Teenagers are notorious for thinking magical elves come in and clean the bathrooms and floors. They are definitely old enough to learn how to handle a dustpan, broom and container of Clorox wipes. While you are busy working on a project for an important client, ask your teen to spend some time on the Everyday Cleaning Tips website. The site offers easy-to-follow instructions and advice on how to clean just about everything in the home. Ask your teen to use the site to learn how to transform the soap-scum-covered tub into one that sparkles, or to properly scrub a toilet.

Driving Test Prep

If you have a teen who is chomping at the bit to get his or her driver’s permit, you probably have picked up the booklet from your local Motor Vehicles Division. But while it can be fun for you to quiz your kiddo on the sample questions in the book, your teen can also do a lot of the studying on his or her own. Driving-Tests.org is a terrific and useful website that is great for teens who need to study for their driving exam; the site includes sample tests from all 50 states, as well as encouraging success stories.

Cooking Skills for Beginners

If your teen is constantly interrupting your work by calling out “Mom! I’m starving!” it’s time you show your teen how to teach him or herself some basic cooking skills. Fortunately, there are plenty of websites that offer cooking classes for beginners — and some of them even offer free courses that are ideal for teens. Smart Kitchen features a variety of terrific online cooking classes that will help your teen get more comfortable in the kitchen. Once he or she has mastered some basic skills, you can encourage your hungry teen to use cookbooks and websites to find easy-to-fix meals and snacks.

These are only a few of the life skills for teens you’ll find when you peruse the Internet. How-to videos and tutorials are there for the taking.

Check out these other great articles about tips for mom as a work from home professional. Also check out our current job postings for mom professionals.

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