In other posts, I’ve talked about answering emails being a huge distraction, but there’s a bigger distraction lurking about 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. Yes, I’m talking about social media. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest, it’s easy to get sucked into the virtual social world.

While there can be plenty of benefits to using social media for your business, it’s important to evaluate the time you spend on social media. It’s easy to get carried away looking at pictures of mouthwatering food on Pinterest or reading clever graphics people post on Facebook, but is it growing your business?

As a general rule, social media shouldn’t require your constant presence. Think about it, your website doesn’t need your constant presence to thrive. Neither does your mailing list, but it sure can bring in a lot of profit. Why should social media take over your working day? If you’ve got yourself into a trap where social media does require your constant presence, it may not be your most effective marketing strategy and you may want to reconsider how you’re participating.

Once you’ve figured out how much time you really need to dedicate to social media, it’s much easier to come up with a plan to keep up with things in the summer. Here are a few approaches you might take:

• Schedule Social Media in Down Time: I mentioned this a few posts ago, but if you’ve got limited time to work in the summer, keep that time focused on your core business activities like email marketing, content creation, product development and promotion. Use downtime to catch up on tweets and work on your Facebook Page.

• Share Responsibilities with Your Business Partner: If you have a partner in your business, create a schedule that helps make sure social media is covered while one of you is busy. Also, having both of you participate creates even more interesting experience for your followers.

• Hire an Intern or Social Media Assistant: If you don’t have a partner, there’s still no reason you can’t hire a helper or have a small social media team. Make sure you set up a very detailed and clear social media policy so that anyone posting on your company’s behalf knows exactly what’s expected.

• Preschedule Your Updates: You can also automate your social media using a tool like Hootsuite or any other service you prefer. You can preschedule your updates, but make sure you drop by now and then to keep the conversation going and respond to comments.

Whatever approach you take, it’s important to realize that social media is simply a small part of your business and it should be managed accordingly. Scheduling your time, enlisting some help and even automating some of your social media can help you achieve the right balance.

In an ideal world, we would go on vacation, leave the laptop at home and never give business another thought. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the ideal world. For most business owners, going on vacation means having to tote the laptop, iPad or other digital device. However, just because you bring it, doesn’t mean you have to have it attached to your hip. Here are some tips that might help.

Choose Your Device

The important thing is to have the device that works best for you. Laptops can be large, but smaller devices like netbooks, iPads or other tablets may not have the full functionality that you’re looking for. On the other hand, using a smaller device might make it easier for you to get less distracted by work and simply do what you need to do and get offline.

Accessing Your Documents

If you don’t bring your usual computer, you can still have easy access to the documents you need. You can use a popular service like Dropbox.com, but you will have to load the files you need ahead of time. Using an automated backup service like Mozy or SugarSync ensures that you can access ALL of your computer files, even the ones you didn’t think you’d need. Both services also include mobile apps for a variety of platforms, so you can access your stuff from a variety of types of devices.

Do Work Ahead of Time

When you know you’re going to be going away, get super focused and get a lot of your work done ahead of time. There’s nothing quite as motivating as knowing that you’ll be going on a fun vacation when all the work is finished. You can pre-write emails, blog posts, product promotions and get a lot of your work done ahead of time.

Plan Your Device Time

Just like when you’re at home, you should plan your work time while you’re away. Sure, it’s not always possible to know what will be happening every moment of your vacation, but the better you can set your work schedule, the more likely you won’t let work time take over your vacation. If mornings are most convenient, set aside an hour or two in the mornings to get things done.

Get Help with Communication and Customer Support

Having to worry about customer support or answering emails can be the kiss of death to just about any vacation. Hire a virtual assistant (VA) or someone to take care of the daily communication, so you can relax and only work on things that are absolutely necessary.

Plan Your Wifi

Wifi is available in many places, but it’s not everywhere. Find out which destinations will have wifi available to you or consider purchasing a wireless card through your cell phone provider, which can make it easier to get connected wherever you can get a cell phone service. Or many mobile phones can be toggled with your computer (either through USB or Bluetooth) and you can use your phone’s connection on your work device.

Keeping the balance between work and fun can be challenging, but if you plan ahead, things will be much easier. One thing I mentioned in this post was hiring a virtual assistant or someone to help you with correspondence. In my next post, we’ll be talking about outsourcing, even if you’re on a budget.

Just a short post for you today because I don’t want to keep you from getting your work done!

Summer should be about enjoying yourself, getting outside and hopefully getting away from it all. Of course, most of us don’t have the luxury of avoiding work all summer long. Sometimes, we’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get busy, but it’s not always easy if you work from home. I’m sure just about any home or Internet business owner can relate, so here are some tips to stay motivated this summer.

Work hours are your friend: We talked about this in the avoiding distractions post, but it applies here too. When you know when you’re supposed to work, you’re more likely to do it. If you leave your days wide open and think you’ll squeeze work in somewhere, it’s less likely to happen.

Focus on what you like doing: There’s nothing worse than dreading something on our to-do list. Not only do we procrastinate from getting that one thing done, but it can remove our motivation to do anything at all. Always focus on what you’re good at and enjoy. Hire others or take on a partner to do the things you despise, but they enjoy. I’ve never understood why some people love crunching numbers and doing the accounting, but I’m so glad that they do.

Set summer goals: While you may not be working as hard in the summer as you do other times of the year, do set some goals for yourself. Set daily, weekly and monthly goals. Make them challenging, yet attainable and outline the steps you’re going to take to achieve them.

Reward yourself: When you accomplish a goal, give yourself a reward. Whether it’s a camping trip, a weekend away or simply an iced tea on the patio, everyone likes to have their work appreciated. Appreciate yourself readily!

Give yourself a break sometimes: As entrepreneurs, we can be pretty hard on ourselves. We try to pack so much in, create ridiculously long to-do lists, but it’s not really necessary. Always re-evaluate your work plan and adjust it to make sure you get the most important things done.

I guess the real lesson here is to know where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Always have a plan, but be prepared to adjust it where necessary.

Of course, if your motivation has gone down because business has slowed down, we have another problem. We’re going to talk about reviving a slow business in my next post.

When I’m busy, one of my favorite things to do is to bring out some old (but great) content and let it make the rounds again. After all, I worked hard on creating that content and if my readers responded well to it, it’s worth giving it that extra push.

For example, if I’m about to go camping for a week and I run out of time to write one of my weekly emails, I’ll dig through some old stuff to find a gem that is relevant to what we’re talking about today. It might be a blog post, a report or even an email that I sent out previously.

I do this for a few reasons:

• I’ve likely gathered plenty of new readers that haven’t seen this useful resource and it’s new information for them.

• Even for those who followed my work back then, not all of them would have seen the content, so sending it out again, gives them something fresh they haven’t seen before.

• It’s a refresher to those who may have seen the content before. Plus, when I reintroduce the content, I try to add something new and valuable to make my readers think on why the information is important.

• It saves me a heck of a lot of time from having to create even more new content from scratch. I produce new content regularly, but a little break now and then is much appreciated.

Look back at previous content you’ve created. Which posts got you the most thank yous, replies or comments? Could you reintroduce that to your audience and give them even more value?

If you’ve got content, you want to bring out again, here are a few things to do:

• Review it to ensure the information is still up to date. Add any extra information that you think will be of interest to your readers.

• Tell your readers why you’re bringing it out again. What takeaways do you want to share or what feedback have you received about the content?

• Spread it around. Share it with your mailing list, post it on social media, allow your affiliates to brand it and more.

• Advertise it. For extremely successful content that leads to product sales, consider setting up a pay-per-click program to generate even more business.

Good content is meant to be shared and reshared. You’ve probably got some gems in your archives, just waiting to be shined and shown again.