Internal Alarm Clock a time management tool?

Some of us are blessed with an internal alarm clock. A little voice that wakes you up two minutes before your alarm goes off. This may be a blessing if that little voice also alerts you ten minutes before your sons soccer game or before the school bell rings. However I dont have that blessing.

Of course I have the internal ability to wake up 30 minutes BEFORE I have to wake up after only five hours of sleep. Unfortunately that alarm doesnt seem to carry over into the waking hours. A thirty minute heads up would be handy.

Not having that constant heads up, instead, I wear the super mom cape as I leap over shoes, bags and the cat in a flurry of movement. Knowing full well that the school bell is going to ring in ten minutes and the drive is a minimum of 11 minutes and three seconds if no one is in the cross walk and that light isnt red. Of course, I will have to drive laps to locate a place I can stop to let my son in. All the parking spots are taken by those nannies with an internal clock.

I thought I had the alarm clock before I had children. As a professional Nanny I was never late for a soccer game, a music lesson, or birthday party. It turns out there are two types of internal alarm clocks. The one reserved for those of us who dont have children under the age of 18. This one allows you to roll out of bed just before your alarm goes off after a night of 8 hours of restful sleep.

Then theres the other alarm clock. The one called the mom alarm clock. This internal alarm wakes you up at three minutes before the baby needs to be fed, or two minutes before your toddler wets the bed, or 8 minutes before your five year old wakes up with growing pains. Sometimes these alarms are all in the same night. The mom alarm clock results in a pure hatred of the real alarm clock that wakes you up at 7 am as the children are peacefully sleeping telling you to start your day.

Luckily I have some other time management tips under my cape to keep me on time and organized as a mother. Despite the internal mom alarm clock working against me at night, my children make it to their soccer games and birthday parties, usually with the present and cleats in the bag. Was that the blue bag or the red one?

Kay McFarlane is the designer of the printable mom planner and owner of http://OrganizedFamilies.com. Her time management skills and humor help her make through each week as the busy mom of three children, contractor, student, and business owner. That same humors and skills are shared each week at her website for busy moms.

Make Extra Spending Money in time For Holiday Shopping

With the holidays just a few short months away, now is the time to try to get extra cash to spend on your friends, family and maybe even youself. You'll hear all over the news to try and NOT use your credit cards, as interest rates will kill you later. It can be so hard to decide how much to spend on people, and what you can afford without going broke doing it. So what can you do, in order to make that extra money you may need for the holidays? Follow our tips below to help you find that "hidden" cash that you can use now to make your holidays merry and bright.

1. Clean out your house - Look around your house/garage. Do you have anything you don't use anymore, doesn't fit, given as a gift but you didn't want it to begin with? Sell it on eBay. Take your item, do a search on eBay and see what similiar items are going for now. You can do a short 3 day sale, or a 7 day sale, depending on how quickly you need the cash. Take good quality digital photos of your item, and make sure your description covers everything. If your items are quite large, and too expensive to ship, offer a "pick up only" option, to lure those in your area to bid on your item. Be realistic about the price as well. If you start the bid too high, you may end up getting no bids at all. Many times a lower starting bid will start a bidding war in the end between people who have gotten the "auction itch" and now want your item regardless of the price. When I sell on eBay, I prefer buyers who either send me a money order, or PayPal only. It gives you better options in the end.

2. Organize a neighborhood yard sale - Get you and your neighbors together to have a commuinty yard sale. Advertise in the paper for either free, or cheaply, and then more people are likley to come if they see that there are multiple families participating as compared to just one. Make it worth their while. Have coffee and donuts available for the early birds. If they want to talk you down, bargain with them. Remember - you are trying to make extra cash so every little bit counts.

3. Cut out buying coffee/lunch for a month - If you like to have that $4.00 cafe latte every morning, and lunch at the local spot, try bringing it from home for a month, and see how much you can save. Put the money you would've spent that week in a jar. By the end of the month you could have anywhere between $80 - 200 dollars at the end of the month, depending on how much you were spending.

4. Offer your services - If you bake well, or are crafty, tell your friends that you'll make those school cookies, or teacher's gifts for a nominal fee. Some parents may even like it if you delivered those items as well, which you could add to your cost.

5. Look in the paper for temp jobs - if you have the time, perhaps only on the weekend, see if local stores are offering seasonal jobs that would give you extra spending money. Even better would be an employee discount, where you could use your extra cash for gitf buying.

There are many other ways for you to come up with extra spending money for the holidays. Don't let the credit card companies lure you into thinking that you can spend up to your limit. You can easily and creatively have a great holiday season without breaking the bank. Good luck to you all!

S.W. Chadwick has been working in online businesses from home since 2000. She has written dozens of articles regarding entrepreneurial pursuits and online businesses. To learn more about working from home, please visit http://www.dowhatyouloveandmakemoney.com. Copyright 2006, S.W. Chadwick, All Rights Reserved

From Educator To Working At Home - and Making Money!

My name is Ron and Im 52 years old. I taught high school math and coached basketball for 27 years and enjoyed many successes and personal satisfying moments. I left that part of education 3 years ago and am now the athletic director at our school.

Coaching allowed me to meet many of the most successful coaches in college basketball history and attend their clinics and even work at their summer camps. The educator in me has always wanted to know what makes successful people - successful. Ive accumulated ideas from hundreds of biographies and autobiographies of successful people in all areas of life. Ive tried to incorporate those into my teaching and coaching to help prepare young people for life. It didnt make me a lot of money, but it was very rewarding. Someday Id like to develop a website for success ideas/stories/inspirations of all the material Ive collected over the years. But thats for another time right now.

I spent many years in that career I loved, but unfortunately didnt profit from huge salaries. Ive really learned to love exploring on the computer and as I near retirement I was searching for something that was enjoyable and yet something that could be profitable. Searching the web for these kind of ideas is almost incomprehensible! I have sifted through literally hundreds and thousands of ideas and sometimes it makes my head spin.

However, recently Ive come across an opportunity called The Ultimate Wealth Package. It is a program developed by Mark Warren and is definitely different from all those other head spinners. Mark is very thorough in his explanation and completely lays out exactly what you need to do in order to be successful. He explains that this is not a get rich quickly program, but if you follow his plan you can make some money and enjoy what youre doing at the same time. Im not the most computer savvy person in the world - but this is very easy to follow. I am also not the most liberal person - most of my ex-students and athletes would probably say Im very conservative! However Marks program is one that I felt completely comfortable with am looking forward to making part of my life from here on out. If things could work as well as I may hope - it may even allow me to move my retirement up a few years and allow me to enjoy things Ive only dreamt about.

I dont know if youre situation is anything like mine or not, but it really doesnt matter. I think this is an opportunity that could be good for anyone. I would say proceed carefully (like I did) and compare this to other programs youve researched. I really dont think youll be disappointed.

Ill end with a quick motivational story from a book that is probably my favorite of the hundreds/and even thousands from those Ive read. If you havent read Gary Barnetts book HIGH HOPES - you should do so immediately. He took over an absolute dismal college football program at Northwestern and a few years later had them in the Rose Bowl. He simply said: What they (the players) didnt understand was that at 211 degrees, water is just hot. At 212, one more degree of temperature, water turns to steam, which can create enough energy to move a train through a mountain pass. We were simmering at 211.

Ive always tried to inspire my students and athletes to work hard for that one little extra degree. Then they can watch the fruits of their labor pay off. This is exactly how Im going to approach this program. It has inspired me in much the same way.

I wish you well and hope that you will reach for that one last little degree in whatever it is that you want to be good at!

Ron Probst was a high school math teacher and basketball coach for 22 years. Since retiring from the coaching side of education he has gone back to school to earn his administrators license and is currently a high school athletic director. To find out more about Mike Warrens program, log onto http://www.yaswebsites.com/M305663W