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Home › Articles › Career Matters › Working from Home

Working from Home

It's Not As Easy As It Looks

By Kelly D. Burgess

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Without that support, notes Oberlin, you may have to take a good hard look at what work you choose to do from home. Because her youngest son was premature and needed a great deal of attention, she had to give up a lot of client-based work.

Here are a couple of other ideas:

  • Hire a college or high-school-aged girl to come in for a couple of hours a week after school.
  • Look for local Mother's Day Out programs, often sponsored by churches.
  • In an emergency, such as having to make an important phone call, have a special basket of toys or special video tape tucked away that you can pull out and will keep the children busy for at least a bit while you deal with business.

"You have to get out of the 9 to 5 mentality when you work at home," says Singer. "There aren't uninterrupted blocks of time to get things done. You're never really fully at home or fully at work. Once you can accept that and just do whatever you can do at the moment, it gets much easier."

Both Oberlin and Singer note that it's important to be focused when you do have time to work. Forget about the house, yard and whatever standard of perfection you would normally hold yourself to.

Getting Started and Looking Ahead
You may find something you can do from home you can jump right into, but most businesses are going to require some pre-planning. Oberin says it's important to put together a business plan to make sure what you're doing is a realistic idea especially if you're going to seek financing. She uses herself as an example: For a long time she had an idea that she'd like to start a newsletter targeted at a particular profession. After doing a business plan she realized that the only people who needed it couldn't afford it.

As for looking ahead, remember that your life is not always going to be the same. Kids will eventually go to school, they'll get old enough to make their own snacks, help clean the house and even drive themselves around. Now that Oberlin's kids are older, she's gone back to school to get a graduate degree in counseling and plans to work as a counselor in addition to writing.

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