Top Ways To Stay Focused

Take breaks every hour: Sure, you can work a twelve-hour day, but you can't stay 100% focused all of the time. No matter how effective you are, you will get distracted and actually become less productive over time.

I have found that taking a five- or ten-minute break every hour helps me stay on task. Get up, step outside for a few moments, and get some fresh air. The change of scenery and moving around a little bit will help you regain your focus.

Take the weekends completely off: Working mothers rarely take their full weekend just to relax. Errands, housecleaning, kids and their activities--all these commitments seem to take priority. Additionally, if you try and catch up on work during your weekend, you'll get run down.

Every now and then it's good to take the weekend completely off from every type of work you do. This means no work email, no phone calls, no errands, and no cleaning. Just have fun.

Listen to music: Studies have shown that listening to music is one of the few activities that actually involves using your entire brain. All cultures listen to music, and there are many benefits--from memory improvement, to helping with stress management, to more focused attention, even to physical coordination development.

Personally, I have always noticed how music can change my mood. I know when I listen to upbeat tunes, I always feel a bit happier or motivated to get up and move. In the same way, classical music has a way of calming my frayed nerves. I like to have a playlist for each of my moods: angry, panicked, exhausted, and seeking motivation, depending upon what I need.

Like all moms, it's easy to fall into the trap of taking care of everyone but ourselves. Make sure you are being kind to yourself. It's a surefire way to ensure that you will be the best mom, the best worker, and a great caretaker of others.

"Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself." Katherine Hepburn Eliminating guilt begins--and ends--with changing our belief that we somehow need to "make it up" to our children. We don't need to apologize for working, we just need to give our very best every day.

By reframing our mindset to focus on the benefits of working motherhood, we will shed our guilt once and for all. The last step in this process to becoming a proud working mom is to remind ourselves of the many reasons we work.

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