I’ve joined a new weekly meme-type thing, and it is hosted by Work at Home Musings. You’ll see a tab up above that has the list of participants, it’s the one called “QotW”. Each week on Monday, she’ll ask a question for us to answer on our blogs. You are seeing mine on Friday, because I apparently cannot read anymore, and I was expecting the question TODAY. I told ya’ll I was losing my mind!

This week’s question (she asked on monday, ya’ll, just sayin’) is:

How many hours a week do you spend on your home business? Do you think it is too much or too little?

I aim to spend at least three hours a day working. I find that I typically work at least 5. This week, I’ve not been working as much because I have been concentrating on spring cleaning instead. As for too much or too little, it’s both. It’s too much when I don;t get to spend as much time with my family as I’d like, and too little when I don;t get all I need to do done, which is most of the time.

I posted real quick on my “smaller blogs” last night and gave myself the weekend off. I desperately need to get some things caught up. So! I need to

done return comments via email
done clean the boys bathroom
help boys clean their room
done change my bedding
pull everything out of my side of the closet
go through my index cards and separate the tasks
spend some time thinking and networking and pimping the blogs
ha, this is next week post the Southern Fried Carnival

I think I have found a decent solution to my problems with eye strain, and it doesn’t involve contact lenses or glasses. I changed my monitor settings, and set the brightness way down. It has really helped a lot with the eye fatigue and focusing, and I got a bonus out of it: fewer headaches! All in all, it’s working well for me, although I do have to turn it back up occasionally when I am working on photos.

Technorati Tags: eye strain, monitor settings

I finished the work on this site’s categories yesterday. I’m glad it’s done, and I can now do what I enjoy: writing. Overall I am pleased with what I have accomplished.

SO, I didn’t choose between tasks yesterday, but tried to do them all. And was pretty successful at it. All the posts over here are categorized, with the exception of 3 that I labeled “move it”. Those belong over here. That’s fine, too, because there are a few posts here that belong there, too, and I’ll be moving those as well.

One thing of very special interest. I found my old schedule over there, the one I used before my life felt quite so crazy. I actually had an email that I used to open, and delete items as I had accomplished them. It was so incredibly helpful, because it helped me stay focused. I thought I had lost it when we lost our hard-drive in the great crash of 06, but apparently not. I don’t even remember blogging that, LOL, but I will be looking it over and tweaking it to accommodate my additional tasks.

So what are my plans over here? I had someone evaluate my blogs for me, and I found her observations incredibly helpful. One of the things she said was that this blog was very similar to CassKnits! I talked a lot about my kids etc, on here. Well, if you look over in the sidebar where I keep my blog manifesto, you will see that this blog is supposed to be about ME. My thoughts, my feelings, my life beyond being a mother. While that is a lot of who I am, there is more to me than that. Accordingly, I’ll be moving those posts that focus on the children instead of on me, my thoughts, me, my emotions, me and my feelings.

I am attenuating. That’s today’s new word. I looked it up, and it doesn’t mean to attend, as I thought. Attenuate means to make slim. (The drug tenuate is based on this word.) I am doing that over at CassKnits: trimming the pile of posts I need to re-categorize. As I make a new post on any blog, I run over there and re-cat 10 old ones. Slow and steady will have to win that race, because I will go insane if I try to do it all at once. Considering that I started this project with over 1600 posts, I’m satisfied with the progress I’ve made. And in five minutes or less, there will be just 434.

Technorati Tags: attenuating, new word

Ya’ll may have noticed the new category “cass works”. I’ve tried not to talk much about my work on this blog, and I’m changing that. Work is very much a part of who I am, and so it deserves a place here on this blog that is all about me. Working on-line just makes the ultimate sense to me. The internet has been an enjoyment to me for along time, and I enjoy writing on my many blogs, and the study that goes into making good posts.

In addition to writing, I also occasionally participate in paid online surveys. That link will get you started if you would like to share your opinions via surveys. It’s not as lucrative from day to day as writing, but it does help pad the coffers, and doesn’t require a huge commitment of time and mental energy.

Technorati Tags: paid online surveys

PayPerPost is going to release some big news in the near future. I have a pretty good idea what it is, since I stumbled across the website by accident. I’m not going to spill the beans though. I will answer the question they asked: how do you think the world will react? Frankly, I think most of the world will ignore it, and the same bloggers who’ve been dissing PPP since it’s inception will have a field day with this. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.

Here are a few announcements I wish they’d make.
1) Yes, you know your own blogs better than we do, since you have been the ones writing them. We apologize for our high-handedness in trying to tell our best bloggers what they actually talk about on their blogs.

2)We’re sorry we rolled out the whole segmentation thing without explaining it adequately to either the Posties or the advertisers. We made an error, and we have compiled a fact sheet explaining categories and tack scores and bans, and this fact sheet will be sent to every advertiser and blogger via email.

3)We’re sorry that some of our Posties have been unfairly penalized because we didn’t bother to explain what a ban meant to a blogger when we encouraged advertisers to use it. We will go back to the advertisers and verify that they meant to ban *every blog* a Postie has, and not just the one the opp appears on. Additionally, we will remove bans that advertisers have placed just to keep a blogger from taking their opps, when the content and writing are fine. We’ll encourage them to use phrases such as “please do not take this opp if you have blogged for us in the past”.

4)Regarding the bans, we apologize for telling you to improve your blogs, and then not giving you feedback by refusing to reveal the reasons advertisers may be displeased with your work. In the future, you will receive email notification of any ban, and while bans will stand, we will remove the negative impact from your tack scores of those bans that are not due to poor work quality.

Perhaps if PPP makes a couple of those announcements, I will be in love with them again. I’m just not right now. I’ve tried to keep my recent feelings of discontent off my blogs, because I still believe that PPP can turn this ship around and get it headed back in the right direction. Acknowledging that you have left your best writers confused and angry would be a great place to start. If you don’t begin to address these issues, then soon you will have left only those bloggers you were attempting to get rid of with segmentation.

Technorati Tags: PayPerPost, blogs