Home Work or Working at Home? Is This The Life For You?
The desire to work at home has inflicted multiple workers over the past few years. The numerous benefits inherent in home work make leaving office cubicles seem a worthwhile endeavor. When one decides to work at home, he has the opportunity to choose when he wakes up, when he begins working, whether he wants his own brand of coffee or prefers traveling to Starbucks and setting up his workspace there, with human company and freshly-brewed lattes surrounding him. The scenery is much more appealing than simple gray office walls.
That view of work at home is idealistic; some overlooked, critical elements may dissuade one from forgoing his typical work environment. Among those elements is the significance of inherent self-control one needs to ignore potential distractions that frequently appear around one’s house. Even pets can become frustrating; they relieve themselves in the middle the living room, for instance. Those situations must be dealt with, regardless of how much work must be done. Unless one works in a building that permits employees bringing their pets to work, those kinds of distractions remain irrelevant.
Freelancers learn the significance of balancing work with home life immediately, as well as the importance of guaranteed pay checks. That is, most of their pay checks are not guaranteed, at least not guaranteed to come in on a specific day each week. Their clients change from project to project, so they must constantly search for new opportunities to earn a living.
At a traditionally structured corporation, in which employees always arrive at nine and leave at five, income is secure, because their jobs usually provide guaranteed annual salaries (unless they get fired for sub-par production). But if the employee remains a productive worker and repeatedly produces a at a steady rate, the option exists for promotions, incentives, etc. Just staying around in a company for a sustained period of time increases the chances the employee may be considered for a higher position.
They must also scour tons of job-hunting sources to find new clients. Income may prove unreliable, unsteady, and frequently stress-inducing. Though freelancers are sitting at home, they may not have enough in their savings account to make a punctual mortgage payment. Who knows how much longer those walls will be around?
Even with the downsides of freelance work, the benefits (mainly working at home) appeal to many traditional office workers. Those employees are becoming more cognizant of the viability of transferring from their business office to their home office, mainly because of so many communicative platforms that exist now. Those platforms allow employees to submit work that, in the past, could only be done at an office. With email, phones, faxes, Skype, etc., employees can now do the same work at home and simply send it to the supervisor. This convenience allows different categories of workers, such as new mothers or physically disabled, to produce the same level of work as their counterparts, but from a home environment.
A writer for Black Enterprise Magazine, Maria A. Reed-Woodward, noticed this trend of office workers transferring home and composed an article exploring the topic. The International Telework Association conducted a survey that found the number of teleworking employees grew from 41.3 million in 2003 to 44.4 million in 2005 and projects that number to climb to 51 million by 2008. Woodward quotes Jan Anderson, director of Midwest Institute of Telecommuting, who summarizes the general direction to which those statistics point: “There is a trend toward making jobs more mobile and permitting employees to have remote access to work from home.”
Those numbers are awfully reassuring for people who dream of their boss saying, “Yeah, sure, you can work at home.” But those people must first consider how well they function when left to their own devices, without supervision or direct motivation. Knowing the boss can slink around the corner at any given time is an extraordinary deterrent; it keeps employees from spending too much time with Tetris, Facebook, or fantasy football.
If one values his independence and strongly wishes to work at home, I suggest consulting some freelancers who operate under those conditions and asking them to summarize their daily activities, financial issues, and general states of their careers. That way, one can ascertain whether a position that allows them to work at home is genuinely befitting of their personalities and work habits, as well as their financial requirements.
James Scottworth enjoys writing articles regarding home business. In the past he’s penned about how to earn money taking surveys. If you’d like to get paid for surveys be sure and visit this free site that provides resources for finding paid surveys.
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