How to Lose Weight Drinking a Yummy Strawberry Shake Every Day #HealthyLiving

I wrote back here about giving the Trim Healthy Mama plan a shot. Except I still haven't cracked open the book. I have tried several recipes from the cookbook, but I'm definitely not sticking with the plan 100% ... or even 50%. BUT there is one thing I pretty much have every day because it feels like LIFE to me and doesn't give me a sugar headache and fills me up and makes me feel AMAZING.

Essential Tips for Starting a Business from Home

Starting a business is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging and simultaneously thrilling experiences someone can go through. In the modern market, the costs of starting up your own business venture can be astronomical, so many are choosing to set up their own office at home to save the pennies and be closer to their families. If you want to enjoy your very own business successes from the comfort of your home office, then this article is for you. In this quick guide, you will learn of three great ways you can get started building a strong business or company from the ground up.

How To Start A Business When You Have A Young Family

Sometimes running a business while raising a family means multi-tasking :-)

Raising a family and running a business have certainly got something in common; they are both hard work, but that hard work is worth it when you see what you have created. You may feel that if you do one of these things, you can’t successfully do the other, but that’s not accurate. It is entirely possible to both run a business and raise a young family if you are organized and practical. Here are some ideas on how to do it.

Know When To Say No

People will always be asking something of you, and it’s essential that you can say no to the things that you won’t find joy in, that won’t boost your business, or that will take you away from precious time with your family. You need to be able to balance all of your commitments carefully, and if too many people are asking too much of you in one direction, then the balance will be off, and everything can topple down. The easiest way to say no (or yes) is to take your time. When you are asked something, think about it first and weigh up the pros and cons before responding. Don’t feel bad if you can’t help out because your family and your business definitely need to come first.

It may be that you need to outsource some of your work to give yourself more free time, especially if you are feeling overwhelmed. Data recovery and network security could be outsourced to Secure Data Recovery Services, for example, and marketing and accounting are also great parts of your business to outsource to professionals.

Find Great Childcare

When running a business, there will be times when you need to attend meetings, workshops, networking events, or meet up with customers. It means you need to find great and reliable childcare. Although it is ideal if you can schedule these events to be few and far between, and ideally use technology such as email or video calling instead of needing to be in a different place physically, it can’t always be so. You will need to compromise, and the childcare that you find will make all the difference. You can run your business without having to worry about the welfare of your kids too.

The childcare might be paid for such as a nanny or babysitter, or it could be a family member or friend. If you can work in ‘shifts,’ it might even be your spouse or partner. It may take a little while to find someone you’re completely comfortable with, so start your search early and always have a backup, just in case.

Work At Night

If you have young children and they need you during the day, you should be prepared to run your business during the evenings when they are asleep. It will mean you get less downtime (so it’s even more important to learn to say no in this case), but if this is the only way to build your business, then it will be worth it. If you can work extremely hard during the first few months or years, it will pay dividends in the end, and you may even be able to step away from the business after a while and leave your employees to deal with things. Working hard at unsociable times at the start can make all the difference.

Why Do People Take Master's Degrees?

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So, you have already taken your undergraduate degree and you are wondering whether or not it is
worth pursuing the path of education any further by taking a master’s degree? Of course, this is not a
path for everyone but is can end up bringing all sorts of advantages to your working life. Perhaps you
have been mulling over this decision and you are wondering what drives people to take this decision in
the first place. Well, here are just a few of the top reasons why master’s degrees remain an attractive
proposition.

Get Noticed in a Competitive Job Market

Since so many people are taking undergraduate degrees these days, you may find that it doesn’t provide
the level of prestige needed to get modern employers to sit up and take notice. A master’s degree may
end up being what provides you the edge over your competition. Of course, before you take it, you should
think carefully about what sort of field you are trying to enter in the first place. A generalized master’s
degree may not be as useful as a more specialized one.

Pursue Your Subject Area in More Depth

An undergraduate degree only tends to provide you with an overview of a particular subject area,
whereas a master’s degree gives you the opportunity to pursue it in more depth. Say you already
have an engineering degree at undergraduate level, you could then move onto taking an
electrical engineering degree online. Many first degrees only give you an overview of the subject,
whereas their follow-up courses allow you to get the type of specialist knowledge which many
employers are actively looking for.

Take Studying More Seriously

Since many people only go into undergraduate study when they are only 18 years old, these
years are often associated with late nights, alcohol, and rushed essays. But since you are
older and more mature when you pursue master’s study, you can really get an entirely new
perspective on learning. You can also use this opportunity to network and make the kind of
connections which are going to stand you in good stead long into the future.

Pursuing a Career in Academia

For some people, a master’s degree is all about a stepping stone into a career in academia.
Perhaps you would then like to take your Ph.D. at the end of it, before becoming a lecturer or
professor. This gives you the opportunity to become an authority on your particular subject area,
as well as gaining some academic recognition.

As you can see, the reasons for taking master’s degrees are various, although that is not to say that
some of them don’t overlap. Hopefully, this blog post has provided you with a little more clarity on
whether or not this is the right decision for you to make. And since there are so many online courses
out there these days, it is more possible than ever to fit master’s study around your other
responsibilities.  

How to be More Productive When Writing at Home

Please enjoy today's guest post by Margaret Latham :-)

Every parent who has tried to hold down a writing job at home has struggled with productivity sometimes.
I know I struggled with it for months at a time until I made some serious changes. I want to share with
you the changes I made to help you accomplish the same things and become more productive.

I would find myself constantly distracted by the TV shows I wanted to watch and by ads and irrelevant
articles online as I did my writing research. My writing time is spent researching as much as I write,
and it was easy to get distracted when I became stuck or bored. Then I would just browse the internet,
check my Facebook feed, watch YouTube videos or read celebrity gossip. I had to make some changes
to ensure that I wasn’t just wasting my time at home while everyone else was at work or school.

Take Breaks

This may not be the most important piece of advice I can share with you, but it is one that is often
overlooked. You do need to take breaks every so often. It’s good for your eyes to get away from the
computer screen for a while, so if you tend to spend your breaks looking at websites that don’t involve
your research, then you need to find a different way to take a break. Your body needs a break from
sitting in the writing chair or wherever you are sitting while you work.

You need to get up, take your eyes off the screen and move around a bit. I like to take a break like this
every hour or two. Tina from DiamondClean mentions “I will go do some housecleaning, wash dishes,
do laundry or just pick up some toys or trash throughout the house.” This not only gives me a break
from sitting and staring at a screen, but it also allows me to accomplish something that I would have to
do later anyway.

Plan Rewards

A lot of times, writers feel drained after sitting in front of a screen for a long time. The body gets tired
and slows down, and it is easy to tall into the trap of just lazily going from one website to another
wasting time. One way to change up that routine and get out of the rut is to place awards for yourself
throughout the day. If there are sites you like to visit regularly, you can tell yourself that once you get a
project done or write so many thousand words, then you will take five minutes to look at the site.

You can also use snacks as self rewards and take a snack break when you finish something significant
in your writing. You want to be careful about binge eating and overeating, though, so limit your snack
breaks and try to eat healthy snacks.

Keep Your Energy Up

A similar problem that writers suffer from is a lack of energy. Sitting all day at a computer screen is not
good for your energy levels, and it is normal for you to feel like not doing anything. Your motivation
feels shot, and you start to feel depressed. You need to change up the way you eat and exercise to
bring up your energy levels.

Instead of having a soda or something with sugar while you work, you should eat something with
Omega-3 fatty acids or some fruit. Water is a great way to boost your energy levels too, as it detoxifies
your body and hydrates you to keep your body working at optimum efficiency.

You can also take an exercise break every now and then. If you sit down all day, your energy levels
will be very low, but if you spice things up by doing a little bit of exercise every few hours, then your
body will stay active and your mind will work much better. This gets the blood pumping and keeps your
body feeling alert and active, and that allows you to get a lot more work done.

Set Goals

If you have no set goals for the day or the week, then you will feel like you don’t have to do very much
sometimes. You may sit down to work and then not feel like doing much, and since you have no goals
in mind, it won’t seem bad to you to just be lazy. You can change that behavior and stop it dead in its
tracks by making either a mental or a physical list of goals for the day and the week.

You can determine to get so much done each day or even break it down hour by hour. Those people
who are easily distracted need to have constant goals in mind to keep working steadily, so an hourly
breakdown of goals is not a bad thing.

Determine to accomplish a certain amount of work for each of your goals, and if you don’t meet those
goals, then you can skip one of your breaks, take a shorter lunch or work a bit longer that day. Goals
are a reward in themselves, but you need a way to punish yourself if you fail a goal. You can use the
tips we just mentioned or come up with your own creative methods of penalizing failure. The important
thing is that you make it important to stick to the goals. Now, you can revise goals as necessary, if you
find that they are unreasonable as you start to do the work. That’s fine, but you need to keep the goals
in mind and keep working toward something.

If you don’t give yourself set goals, then you are more likely to wander and lose productivity. You can’t
just say that you will work until a certain time. You need to be setting yourself objectives to accomplish
in that time. Otherwise, you will end up doing very little and then quit at your appointed time, having
accomplished almost nothing.