Hi you guys! I’m Jackie here coming to you for another Mid-Week motivation. Actually I just wanted to do this today to share with you a day in my life so to speak, to walk you through how my day normally is and I thought the best place to do it is from my laptop. So I’m going to be dragging this around.

So great to have you! I’m Jacky from GetOnlineGetKnown.com. Sometimes you’re wondering, okay, so do I have what it takes to be an entrepreneur or can I actually run an online business or what does it mean to actually work from home or be home-based.

Because what I do is help entrepreneurs get themselves out there and get their market to know about them and become visible  and just put themselves out there and I also work from home.

So I consult, I coach, I do all sorts of things and I just wanted to show you what it looks like for me. It might look very different for someone else but maybe it’ll be a motivation for you and you may see “Okay it’s not so difficult, it’s actually possible”. So this is a behind-the-scene,  more like I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek into my life.

So this is actually my bedroom this is where it all starts obviously.

I wake up in the morning right there and I’m trying to become a bit more consistent with my morning routine because, what I’ll do, I’ll normally have my TV right there and I’ll make some space there to do some exercise and I like to do a lot of heart pumping aerobics, I use the Seven-minute Fitness which is a great Android app. I think it’s also on iPhone as well or on iOS as well. I love it, it’s got great really quick seven-minute workouts that you can do. I also have something I do outside which is a trampoline but that’s how it starts. That’s my morning routine.

Before I get out of bed I like to also meditate. I’m currently using the Bible app which I really love. It’s got some great meditations that you can do during the morning. I love that and for you maybe you want to tried some other thing but what I’ve noticed is meditation just sets me up, it starts me off in the right way because you guys know this whole thing about mindset. If you get started right in the morning they really help. For me I found that the day’s that I don’t meditate, the day that I just don’t pause and really focus on the gift that God has given me and how I’m using that gift and how He’s enabling me and everything then the day doesn’t go according to plan.

That’s what I start with. I’m just gonna walk you through my house, it might be a little bit dark but that’s where it starts.

The next thing I do is breakfast but when I do want to get ready then I’ll do that of course in my bathroom and everything. I’m not going to show you that.

I’ll just walk you through to the family area. What I like to do is sit with my kids and my husband in the morning for breakfast. I’m walking you through to my dining area, that’s where we sit for breakfast and I must say that this atrium that you can see behind me. This is at the center of our home and it really features for me a whole lot in everything I do because I like to be in light. I like to be in warmth. I like to be in a place with light, I figure that light is life, really when you’re in a place with greenery.

I’m trying to get some good lighting. I like to spend my time here either seated at the dining table right there or sometimes I’ll be working down in the bar which is a standing desk sort of, I’ll show you the standing area.

You know this is my life. Sometimes I work in the bar right here because I like to stand. I’ve noticed that standing and working keeps me more alert, I find that I was having bad posture because that’s something that I’ve been trying to work on, just posture because really when your posture is okay then you don’t have all these aches and pains that come. So trying to work on my posture, trying to work on standing. I I read this article, as I said, that said it doesn’t matter how much exercise you do if you’re sitting the entire day. That’s actually the biggest thing that will bring you just poor health. So I like to stand when I’m working where possible. I do that in the bar right there.

So as I was saying, I was just showing you my routines’s. I normally have my breakfast right there with the family. When they leave, I’ll sit right and keep working and then get ready much later. But one thing I found is really important when you’re working from home is that you do need to get up and get going. Rather than just sit and spend your days in your pyjamas, trust me it’s a mind thing. Like when you’ve been here for days in your pyjamas, you would actually not feel like you’re getting work done right?

I check a bit of email check, a bit of IM’s on Facebook that kind of thing then I’ll go and I get ready and shower for the day. When I come back and sit right here, this is actually where I love to work right here on my dining table because I find that as I was saying earlier it really gives me a great view.

It gives me let me just really feel a lot of happiness and life I suppose when I’m somewhere that’s green, somewhere in the Sun occasionally.

I also stand outside, this is the outside area where I tend to sit and I’ll come and I’ll hang out here as well. I don’t sit here as much but it’s also a bar area where I can actually stand.

When I’m trying to do more standing when I’m working, I’ll stand here and I’ll work here. So my morning routine is normally  I like to do work on my computer, I like to just focus on things usually either content development and content creation.

My approach is called blocking and tackling which is a principle of productivity that I learned from my productivity trainer and that helps me. The previous night I’ll decide what am I going to work on and I have this great app by the way which I just started using which is perfect and it’s the first thing I do when I log on to my email.

It tells me, it asks me so what’s your focus for the day so I just plug that in there to help me keep focused. I plug that in there, what’s your focus of the day, I put in two – four main things I want to accomplish in the day and then once I accomplish them,  every time once I get that done. then I tick it off.  And the great thing is the next morning the app ask’s me the same thing plus it also shows me what I was able to do or not do. It actually brings back what I was not able to accomplish the previous day, that’s the great thing about it.

I find that when I’m able to start my day really focused and when I’m able to do focus on what I’m working on, I find that I don’t lose so much time. You guys may have heard of this thing called context switching. That every time you start working on something and then you move to working on something else you’re losing time every time you switch to a new thing. Let’s say you’re sending emails and then you switch to creating a PowerPoint presentation you’ve lost 20% of your time and I learnt this from Todd Herman. It’s an amazing concept so I try to block and tackle which means I start off my day focusing on specific things and mainly things that really require intense work.

Then let me also show you my office while we’re at it. But I really like to work at my dining table and bar during the day time and then at lunch I will go pick up my kids. I’m about to go do that in a few minutes because it’s almost my lunch time but before I do that, I’m just walking out of my house because I have my office which is separated from the house and I hope the connection won’t drop but I’ll just show you.

This is my office… So that’s where I normally sit. Yes so that’s where I normally sit and I have my laptop propped up there for when I want to do calls and that kind of thing. It’s quiet you know so I have that set up primarily just for working and I have there Gabriella who’s helping me at the moment. She’s assisting me with my work and I just find it really useful to have a spot that’s separate from the house because this is literally separate from the house and I’m able to sit here especially in the afternoon when my kids are around. I’m able to sit here do my work, focus and they can be playing inside the house and it’s quite removed because if you see, I literally step out of my office which is located there and that’s my front yard you can see behind me, my gate. And then I walk back into the house through there.

So that’s how that works. So like I was saying I like to block and tackle and occasionally I will have meetings like this morning of course I had a meeting. I have a Bible study that I normally do every Wednesday so I go for that every Wednesday and then I also have like tomorrow I have a meeting in the morning. So there will be mornings that I do have meetings but I try to push my meetings to the afternoons as much as possible.

I’ve got it all blocked off for my calendar until 11 am in the morning I’m not taking any meetings. And then from 11 a.m. onwards, if people want to book a time to chat with me then the availability is really only afterwards, from 11 am going forward. I’m using all these different tools that help me just manage my time okay I’m using Rescue time as well to help me track what I’m using my time for.

And that’s just it, I suppose when it comes to the nitty-gritty of the work.

It really has to do with if I have any specific clients, if I have any deadlines or any proposals that I need to send out, any calls or follow-ups that I need to make, it’s all very much client driven. There’s a lot of what I do that’s driven by the clients that I’m working with. I also have weekly coaching calls with those on my mastermind so in case you don’t know about that I’m gonna put a link so that you can learn more about it but maybe get on the call with me as well.

But I just wanted to show you guys a bit about the behind the scenes of my day and I do want to take really long to do it but just to show you that some of the tips that I’ve used to just stay focused, and consistency is number one. Just always getting up, getting ready like as if I was going to the office and number two, just really having a separate space where I can focus and that space right now is during the morning, the space is normally at my dining table right there but in the afternoons when the kids are back from school then that will normally be in my office just where I can actually go through the door and get work done.

So hey thanks for checking in and if you’ve any thoughts, questions on how do you work remotely, how do you put your business online, do put them in the comments below and I’ll check it out later.

Bye!