For the past six years I have worked from home and have found that it has benefits, yes, but also pit falls, for me personally, my employment and my family. To help others decide if working from home is right for them I wanted to share some of that journey with you here.
Initially it was the pending arrival of our first baby that had my mind moving in that direction. Like every women I wanted to be an amazing mum and for me this meant being with my children at home so that I could watch them develop and enjoy the process. I had been hearing for at least 4 months now how they grew up so quickly and would be all grown up and not need you before you knew it. Okay, this was a little scary I must admit!
The problem for me though was that I was a ‘new age’ women (bloody women’s lib) and I felt that I would go insane if I didn’t use my brain in some way. This internal conflict was my first encounter with ‘mother guilt’. In case you’re not familiar with the term it’s pretty self explanatory. It’s the amazing guilt that comes on when you become a mother; I believe it’s one of the most crippling forms of guilt around!
Always being a problem solver I began thinking about my options and when I was offered an opportunity to work for a newly establishing company from home, I pounced on it. That was the easy bit.
Outside Perceptions
One of my biggest struggles was a physical thing. Trying to stop myself from pocking people in the eye when I told them that I worked from home and they smiled at me and said how ‘nice’ that must be. They all had images of me kicking back all day playing with the baby and watch Oprah. This was soooo frustrating for me.
Well that outlook certainly made my blood boil and I went about making sure that everyone knew just how hard I worked. It became my mission to convince everyone that I spoke with that I worked just as hard, if not harder, than they did in an office job. So let’s take an inside look at what my cushy at home job consisted of at the start.
Work Life Balance
Well work life balance was more like baby, housewife, career thrashing machine. A little like it was all thrown into the washing machine together to start with. Urgent reports coming in just as my newborn woke up. I am pretty sure I was the first woman alive to master touch typing while breast feeding. It certainly is a skill that came in handy. I would work crippling hours to earn some money while bub was asleep, which meant up to 1am for a while there, then I would do the late night feed and go to bed with my head reeling which meant I didn’t sleep well.
Mornings were a nightmare. I had trouble waking up, but bub didn’t!!! I started to feel sad more than I should and forgot why I was doing this to start with. Lucky for me I had a not so subtle friend who pointed out that I didn’t need to prove myself to anyone. That my baby needed me first and the job was a bonus. If only everyone could be as lucky as I was at that time to hear what I needed and to still be well enough to fix it.
Which is what I did. I became the queen of work life balance and utilise this daily now in my life coaching business. There is an art to setting a good balance and it takes a lot of personal insight and honesty. The first thing I did was sleep…as much as I could. I stopped working late and went to bed well before the late night feed. I set myself a work schedule that was developed ‘around my baby’s needs’. This I reviewed regularly because as every mother knows children change their minds on their routine as soon as you realise they have one.
In this newly discovered work life balance I included some time for me, for my husband, for us as a family, housework, my career etc etc. Everything, you must include everything for it to work!
Be determined
A work life balance routine is fantastic on paper, but I struggle terribly sticking to it to begin with. Because my work was in my home and the medical transcription industry operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week it was disgustingly easy to ‘just do one more file’, if I work tonight I can take tomorrow morning off, a new typist needs training and can only do it outside my works hours, so I’ll do it just this once. The excuses just kept coming and I would bend and before I knew it I was hooked. I know, it sounds just like any other addiction and it was not long before the other typists on my team and I were thinking we would start a new industry “Medical Transcription Anonymous”. I would be the first life member!
With time and dedication I mastered this concept and I can now say that it is possible to work from home, be a house wife, a mother, a wife and your own person. But you have to be perceptive and honest with yourself and the demands that are put upon you by others, but particularly by yourself. After all, you are your own master.
Summary
These are just a couple of things that come to mind tonight and there are many more obstacles that you need to consider when working from home. Let’s summaries quickly.
People who work from home must be:
- Organised
- Strong willed
- Able to motivate themselves
- Creative (problem solvers)
- Dedicate to their cause
- Flexible
- And rigid too!
Looking at list a split personality might help a little too. But then every mother has a bag full of personalities that we put on at different times of the day.
I want to finish with saying that I loved working from home. I did it for six years and I still do two days of the week. If you are thinking about it I would love to answer any of your questions or to hear comments from others who are doing it now. Let’s help take some of the teething problems out of this popular and rewarding trend.
Naydeen.
Checking your emails can be a time consuming activity. You have to be tough to get through all the jokes, kind words, promotional material etc that comes into your inbox as you try desperately to locate that one important e-mail that you are waiting for.
