I still think of myself as a newlywed. A newlywed with two children, a mortgage and a minivan but still…my husband and I have been married for only five years and we’re still figuring everything out. For example, it seems as though my husband can’t read my mind!

Keeping with the spring cleaning theme from Friday’s post…let’s talk about chores.

Because I am a work at home mom, and a busy one at that, I need help on the chore front. When everything gets piled up, I get overwhelmed and can’t focus on anything. If I have to keep walking past a basket of laundry begging to be folded or looking at a TV covered in sticky finger prints, I go a little nuts. “Why am I the only person who sees these things?” I ask myself. “Am I the only person around here who can hang up a frickin’ winter jacket?” I wonder.

The funny thing is, I’ve noticed when I ask my husband to fold some laundry or hang up a coat he just says “sure” and does it.

Hmmm.

For the past few months I’ve been *meaning* to create a schedule of chores to hang on the fridge so that each Mann in our house knows what chores he or she is responsible for. That’s work in itself so it hasn’t happened yet…not until today, I should say.

Enter: Chore Buster. The coolest website ever for dividing up chores. You register for a free account, enter the names of people who do chores in your house AND their email addresses so they can be emailed their chores daily or weekly.

Then you enter your chores. You can even pick which days of the week they’re to be done, how often, how hard the chore is and who should NOT do that particular chore.

When that’s all done you’re left with a handy sheet you can print off and hang on your fridge to keep you on track of who does what everyday.

I hope this makes the chore division around here a little more even and maybe even a little more fun. Until Mr. Mann starts reading my mind of course.

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The soundtrack of my life these days seems to include a lot of Raffi, the unmistakable sound of sliding doors on a mini van and the constant chatter of children demanding snacks, a different movie or new pants.

I chose to be a work at home mom, and I wouldn’t trade this gig for anything. But, boy oh boy, it can be challenging.

The good thing about being creative is that I find some pretty clever ways to buy myself quiet time from two busy little people under three apples tall.

I’d like to share a couple of my favorites because they might help you or a WAHM close to you:

• Busy crafts. Go through old magazines and cut out pictures that would interest your kids. My youngest loves to look at pictures of puppies, babies, women who resemble me (read: brunette women), and food that she can name. I cut those pictures out and then I give my oldest some construction paper, the cut out photos and a glue stick. She makes collages out of the photos her little sister likes, and it’s actually a project they can “collaborate” on for at least ten minutes. If the littlest one is napping, this can keep my preschooler happy for an hour or more.
• Messy fun. Sometimes you’re desperate. Your sitter can’t make it, you had an important call planned, you need fifteen minutes. This is when it’s important to tell yourself the mess doesn’t matter. I’ve been known to encourage allow my children to make as big a mess as they want if I could just have a few minutes to put some thoughts together. Picture this: a box of macaroni noodles,  waterproof markers, a glue stick, a newspaper, a toddler and a pre-schooler. Or, two mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons, a box of grapenuts, some flour, a juicebox and the aforementioned children. You can pretty much use your imagination – figure out what your kids love doing but makes too big of a mess for you to do with them everyday. When you need them distracted, let them do that!
• Grown up play. If you have a filing cabinet and little ones, you know they can’t resist hanging files and papers. I have an old portable filing tote thing that I put old hanging files and folders in. When the girls are bored, I haul that out and give them some scrap paper. They love to play with something they think they shouldn’t be playing with so this goes over big. They can sit and pull out files, stuff papers in and take them out again. An extra fun thing for them is if I give them a sheet of blank address labels to decorate while they’re doing this. Then they can put “stickers” on folders and each other. It’s fun for them.
• Goop. This is an extremely messy craft and shouldn’t be done around carpet. In a bowl, mix approximately half a box of cornstarch with enough water to make it feel like clay – you don’t want it too powdery and you don’t want it too wet. Pick up the “goop” and squeeze it. It will be crumbly. When you let go or hold it loosely it will ooze out through your fingers. It’s solid one minute and liquid the next. Some people like to put food coloring in this, but that just makes it easier to stain stuff as far as I’m concerned. Depending on the age of your kids, this can be a science experiment or just a really fun thing to play with.

I have lots more tricks like this, but these should give you some ideas if you need some time to yourself today. (Of course, you could try doing what I did this morning and ship the kids off to Gram’s house.)

What about you? Do you have some brilliant ways of keeping preschoolers entertained that you’d like to share with the group? If so, please comment!

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It’s Monday morning. Before I start on client work for the week, I usually take some time to go over my schedule for the following five days.

One of my big outstanding to-do items was to do a clean up of my email inbox which I’ve just been “too busy” to get around to. Since Outlook has been crashing about five times a day on me, I figured it was time to do something with the 7000 messages in my inbox.

Over the summer I read David Allen’s fabulous book Getting Things Done, I just haven’t quite applied everything I learned after reading it yet. One of the great things Allen suggests in the book is to apply the 3 Ds to your inbox maintenance: Do it, Delegate it or Delete it. I seem to have a weird phobia about using the Delete key, and I always let me emails pile up.

So here’s how I managed to bring my inbox message count from 7000 to 23 this morning in the amount of time it took me to drink my morning coffee

I sorted my inbox by ‘From’ so all the senders were alphabetized. (I have all of my emails routed to my gmail account as a backup system, so I’m not too worried if I delete something of major importance when I do my regular clean up.)

Then I ruthlessly went through deleting en masse by sender. I had way too much junk to wade through (more than 600 Google Alerts, 400 Twitter messages and hundreds of other social networking notifications from various sites. Delete. I really have to set up some Outlook rules), I moved all messages from each sender to their appropriate folders (easy to drag and drop when they’re sorted by ‘From’), set up new folders, reviewed red-flagged items and found places for them (either delete bin or with a date/time reminder to trigger a look in the future).

The key to doing this is speed. You have to work fast or you’ll get lost in there all day. As I came across emails from new vendors, I just set up a new folder then and there and moved it over. Anything I knew I would never read got deleted. I also made notes about which newsletters and listservs I have to unsubscribe from.

Not sure why I keep getting so buried in emails and why I’m so poor at making new systems stick. I’m going to read Getting Things Done again – more slowly this time – and try to get this under control once and for all!!

If you haven’t read it you should. You can get it here:

Your email management is something that can easily be delegated to a Virtual Assistant. Just probably not this one.

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I started working with a client a few months ago who was using a wiki as a file storage area where team members could also collaborate.

When I realized how helpful a wiki could be (besides being fun to say), I decided I’d like my own wiki to keep my files organized so I opened my own free account at pbwiki (It’s easier than making a “peanut butter” sandwich, they say).

I have folders set up for each of my businesses as well as one each for my different personal creative writing projects (my novel, children’s books, random ideas). The great thing is, you can create a page, write your heart out, give it some tags and file it in a folder. The search function of a wiki is really powerful so if I want to find everything I ever wrote about the economy, I can do a quick search and kaboom – I have all pages that I’ve tagged ‘economy’ right in front of me. If I want to pull up all of my character sketches for my novel, I can pull up everything I’ve tagged as a ‘character sketch’ and I’m on my way.

You can customize even a free wiki, so mine is all pink and pretty which makes me want to use it even more. I recommended that my sister (a school teacher) set up a wiki to store all of the materials that she creates. She lives in fear of a hard drive crash, so this would be a good solution. I don’t know if she took my advice or not, probably not, but I put it out there for her anyway, just as I’m putting it out there for you today.

Check out pbwiki, I think you’ll like it!

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I am an avid reader, and just by sheer coincidence each of the last two books I’ve read have had a honeybee theme throughout. I can’t seem to be capable of watching TV or reading a book without finding a business application and I thought I’d share this one here.

First of all, I have always hated bees. I’m afraid of them even though I know their stings don’t hurt that much. I never realized how truly fascinating those little fuzzy buzzy creatures are.

Let’s, for a moment, imagine that your business is a beehive and you’re the Queen Bee. After all, she’s the most important person in the hive – her sole job is to lay eggs. Without eggs, there are no bees so nothing else can happen. You are also the most important person in your business, goes without saying if you’re a ’solo-preneur’. But all entrepreneurs are responsible for getting new clients and ensuring all daily operations run smoothly.

Each beehive is a whole world in itself. Each bee has a role to play, it’s a very well-organized society. The Queen’s job is to lay the eggs, but there are worker bees who make the honey, there are guard bees who make sure no robber bees get in, there are scout bees who go around finding the best flowers, there are nurse bees who make sure the babies are cared for, there are bees who tend to the Queen – fanning her and caressing her, there are even bees whose lot in life is to remove the dead bees from the hive.

If it were the Queen’s responsibility to make honey, guard the hive, scout for nectar and remove dead bees, how many eggs would get laid?

As a business owner, every second you spend typing up letters, writing newsletters, blogging, entering contacts in your database and researching stuff on the Internet is eating up your egg laying time. Rather…the time you should be spending on meeting with clients, finding new ones and just do what you want to be doing.

Honeybees have a lot to teach us, don’t they? What sort of chaos would a hive be in if the Queen were running around trying to do everything herself? She’s smarter than that. If a Queen bee could give you some advice, she’d probably tell you to go get yourself a virtual assistant so you can focus on what’s important. The future of your company depends on it just as the future of the Queen’s hive depends on her focus on egg laying.

Honeybees invented the art of delegating as far as I’m concerned!

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