Sound like heaven???? (ctoc.co.uk/homeworking_work_from_home.htm)

Member Name: kes33

Product:	ctoc.co.uk/homeworking_work_from_home.htm
Date:	03/06/02 (182 review reads)
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Advantages: Make your own hours, fit around the kids, freedom

Disadvantages: freedom, complacency, not enough work

I have been trying to set up enough work with one thing and another to work from home for over twelve months as yes, it does sound like heaven to me most of the time. In reality however, I think working from home is more difficult than most people would envisage just because it requires you and only you to provide the motivation. Here, I hope to give some advice based upon my own experiences so far.

~~~~~~~~~~~Expectations~~~~~~~~~~~

The kinds of things you hope to gain by working from home are a little obvious really aren't they? Firstly, you think, I'll be able to make my own hours......yes, this is so, but will you be able to stick to those hours? The greatest convienience is that if you have a family, you know you will be able to work around them whatever happens, whether it be school holidays, sickness, whatever. You have to ask yourself also if you can stand the fact that you will no longer have workmates around for ideas/inspiration or just plain gossip! So before you make the decision to work from home, you must examine your reasons.

For myself, my reasons were simple. I wanted to be able to work, yet still be available for my kids. Because I knew that work wouldn't just come to me no matter how many 'money-making' ideas I looked into, I first decided to get a part-time job in the hope that I could make some contacts and build from there. In practice, I have found that this has mostly worked for me from my original idea but is proving more difficult now than I first thought for reasons I will go into later.

~~~~~~~~The Internet~~~~~~~~

In the beginning I thought that much of my work may come from the internet; in reality I find that though there is money to be made online, it is not going to be enough to give you a serious income, though enough bits of work help it along quite a bit. As most of you who use this site probably know, there are a huge amount of schemes out there online that promise
you money for nothing but most of these come to nothing. I have found one or two reputable companies that pay, but will not give you a regular income (See my op on mystery shopping). So........this bit of work from reputable companies must be supplemented with other work.

~~~~~~~~Finding Homework~~~~~~~~~

Now this is the difficult part. I have been lucky in that I have made it clear to my employer (who is a helpful, understanding kind of person, thankfully) that I want to work from home. The first thing that happened here was that she introduced me to somebody who was desperate for someone to do databasing for him. Great! But still the work was intermittant and not enough to provide me with the regular income that I was looking for. The second thing that happened was that I found a local company starting up who also required databasing and I applied for that. Now, this was slightly dodgy sounding but I thought it was worth giving a go as it was internet/home based and very simple.

This new company was involved in the same kind of thing as my employer, so I informed her what I was doing and now she has said that she can find work for me too from home! In other words, making your intentions clear to those around you is a good idea as there are no grey areas; you aren't getting frustrated and they are getting the message! I also put my name forward so much in the local area as someone who would undertake word processing, databasing, research, you name it......incidentaly, the job I did initially for the company my boss put me in touch with, I had never used the software before or worked on that kind of thing before, but I had some knowledge of the kind of thing they did, I just experimented and then applied myself and they were very pleased with the work. In other words, a bit of self belief goes a long way.

In other words, self promotion is the way to go. At one point I thought 'christ, I've got more work than I can han
dle', but though it looked like that for a while, it didn't actually work out like that and I coped!

~~~~~~~~~~Problems~~~~~~~~~~

The kind of problems that I think you can come across are these:

1) Self discipline. At first I tried to fit in the work when I felt I had the time, it didn't really work. Without a schedule to stick to or particular hours, I found that I could quite happily put things off until the deadline was looming. Then I would go all out to make the deadline and find myself burnt out by the end of the job. Therefore, it's imperitive that you set yourself a certain amount of time to work each day. My time is 1pm-3pm, when the littlest one is at nursery (I work mornings whilst she's at playschool) and 6pm onwards until I tire or there's something I want to watch on TV. I find this works for me.

2) Organisation. Within any working time, make sure that all your paper work is in order and any correspondance you need to get sorted is sorted or anything you need to keep a record of is recorded at the end of each session, otherwise you will forget.

3) Interaction with others. At the beginning I didn't think this would be a problem, but after working in an office environment for six months, I realise that it's a problem. We need other people to bounce off, us humans and while there is communication between yourself and others on your computer, it's not the same as other people to laugh with on a one to one/group situation. If you are going to work from home, you need to address where your social interaction is going to take place. If you have a wide social group, this may not be a problem, but, if like myself, you don't have much in the way of support (a reason in itself to work from home), you need to ask yourself if you may become lonely.

~~~~~~~~~Conclusion~~~~~~~~~~~

To list all the working from home possibilites here would be impossible, as it would
to list the reasons for not. Working from home is to take on self employment and all that entails, therefore you must be organised and there is a lot to look into such as the taxman and how much you want to earn etc. Before you begin to work from home, I think you need to ask yourself if it's right for you and if it is, pursue it with the determination that you would if you were going to an office/workplace and treat it just like that, your job. There's even less scope for complacency if you're doing for yourself.

Hope this has been helpful, thanks for reading.

(C) Kerry Downing 2002

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