Home Workers: Working It Out
At one time or another, many home-based workers are asked, “What exactly do you DO all day?”
In the eyes of many, people who work at home don’t truly work. Their lives are neverending vacations; fun jaunts to be envied by those forced to punch a clock each day.
A home work schedule does tend to allow for a certain amount of flexibility, it’s true. A home worker does not have to fill out a time sheet or punch a clock, and won’t be punished for sick days or vacation time. No one will yell at a home worker for a long lunch hour, a nap at work, or even for working in his/her pajamas.
Even so, a home worker is just that, a worker. In order to earn a salary, the home businessperson has to complete his/her work assignments in a thorough and timely fashion. Home workers have deadlines and workloads, just as everyone does; if they take too much time away from their jobs, the likelihood is that they will fail in their corporate endeavors.
It’s also a fact that home-based professionals actually might spend less time on vacation than their office worker counterparts. People who work in-house for major corporations frequently earn vacation time; which means that, eventually, they can take off for one- or two-week periods, with no need to report to the office or complete any work assignments during that time.
Home businesspeople, by contrast, often work continuously throughout the year, taking their laptops and notebooks with them wherever they go. It takes a great deal of continuous time and effort to make a home business work.
Furthermore, as these businesspeople work at home, they’re technically never ‘off work.’ An employer or client could call anytime, day or night, and projects sometimes are not completed within a standard, nine-to-five time frame.
A work-from-home writer, for example, might get a flash of inspiration at 4 a.m., taking them from their bed to their computer desk. A person who runs an Internet-based store might get a rush product order at 5 a.m. Sunday morning, a time when many office workers sleep peacefully in their beds. A caterer might get a call to prepare an entire meal for an event scheduled that evening.
In addition, home workers face a number of distractions not encountered during a typical office work day. While an office worker might take a coffee break at work, a home businessperson might take a break to change the diaper of his/her small child, pick an older child up from school, talk to a visiting plumber about repairs needed in the home, deal with a family emergency, or cook dinner for the family. Friends call (often assuming that a person at home has all the time in the world to talk), dogs bark and bills come in the mail.
This is not to say, of course, that working at home is not a fun, satisfying experience. Ultimately, though, home workers work just as hard as their office-based counterparts. They don’t call it ‘home work’ for nothing…
Lacy Foxnau pens articles online about home work, that succeeds. In the past she’s written about her trials with survey jobs, sites that offer surveys that pay money, and a lot of other real home based ventures.
categories: surveys,making money,working at home,home business,small business,business
Recent Comments