The path to maintaining a lucrative job from home experience is paved with millions of distracting opportunities that can take you off course and waste your time and energy. How do you veer clear of pitfalls? Here are some of my suggestions:

1. Focus on your annual and quarterly income requirements. This will help you know if an opportunity will work for you.

2. Get clear on how much time you can commit to your business efforts. Take into account a completely different level of productivity than your life before kids. For a parent of school-age children, for instance, there will likely be drops in work schedules in summer and December. For parents of young children, count about a week every month for days when unexpected stuff just happens. This may show up as one or two days per week or a week here and there. A child gets sick, your spouse can’t help on a Saturday as planned, that kind of thing.

3.Get to know how much risk you are willing to take. Are you willing to be entrepreneurial? Start a whole new business or a line of them? Play with adwords and adsense on google to generate income streams? Or would you feel safer with data entry? Without judgment, stop for a moment and just consider what is right for you. I like some risk with measurable upside and I like commission-based work. Some people feel SO much better with hourly work, reliable projects, and assignments that are quite tangible and pay a specific amount.

4. Make sure you’re going to like what you’re doing. Identify your skillset. What do you want to contribute? If you forget about this and just “do something” you may dislike what you took on. I believe we have a natural tuning fork inside of us that resonates when things feel good, and tells us (if we listen) when things feel bad or off.

5. Avoid opportunities to pay to be given opportunities. There are exceptions, but in general, you can find data entry jobs and work from home jobs if you scroll and screen and look carefully. The exception would be paying for new tools to help you get things done, like cool new phones that do everything but stand on their toes and dance (and allow you to work from wherever you are whenever you want); or information products that help you learn something valuable.