Work At Home Mom

The hardest aspect of working at home is the fact that you can work any time—and may therefore feel obligated to work all the time. It is easy to burn out when you feel the need to work all the time, when you feel like you are neglecting family members in order to work, and when you work all day trying to “catch up” and then need to work more the next day.

How you do this depends on the type of job you are doing, but it is important to find a work load that allows you to be successful but which also allows you to stop and pay attention to your family. It may be that you set a goal daily of a certain number of hours for your work or that you set a goal for a certain number of activities. For example, you might set a goal of spending one hour on a project, knowing that the project won't be completed in that hour, but also knowing that you will have made progress on it. Or you may get a certain number of phone calls or other contacts started (calling and leaving a message or writing an e-mail).

Finally, it is a good idea to have a quitting ritual. When you work outside the home, you usually have some sort of commute where you can switch gears from work thinking to home thinking. Putting away your work supplies and closing up your office in some way (closing the door or closing all the file cabinet drawers) can help you to do this and can also motivate you the next day because your work space is neat and ready for you.

Because there is no boss around when you work at home, it is really easy to procrastinate on certain tasks. Maybe family activities seem to take priority, but often the problem is that a task feels overwhelming. Perhaps you are facing a task that you find difficult to do. For example, if you are shy, you may dread phone calls and you might put them off until the last minute or not even do them at all. Or, if you have a large project to do, you may feel like it will never get done, so you have trouble getting started. You might feel that you have to do the highest quality work and since you don't have a big chunk of time to do it in, you cannot possibly get started.

All these problems are traps. Procrastination does not make you feel better - in the long run it makes you feel worse because you feel stressed as you try to complete things at the last minute - or perhaps you have failed to complete an assignment because of procrastination.

To beat procrastination, tell yourself you are going to get started on something. Just work on it for a short time - use a microwave timer and set it for ten or fifteen minutes. Then do something more fun for the next fifteen minutes. Alternate the tasks you dread with ones that you enjoy so you are rewarding yourself for getting through the difficult things. Remember that doing something “good enough” is a lot better than not doing it at all because of procrastination.

The great British novelist, Jane Austen lived with her busy family. She did not have any workspace of her own—she wrote her novels in the family living room. There was a noisy hinge on the living room door and when she heard it squeak, she would put her work away and be ready to interact with her family.

If an author can write many brilliant novels a little at a time, then almost any other kind of work can be accomplished a little at a time, which is good news for work-at-home moms.

Often a mom does not have a whole hour for completing a task—it’s ten minutes here, five minutes there.

Fortunately, most tasks can be broken down into steps that can be completed in a short period of time. It’s possible Jane Austen thought about her plots as she completed household chores and other relatively uninteresting tasks and when it came time to write, she was mentally prepared to work on the next chapter or the next paragraph. She probably jumped into the world of her novel, scribbling as fast as possible, and then jumped out of that world when the hinge sounded.

It takes an agile mind to jump in and out of tasks—but that can be done, particularly when the reward is a feeling of accomplishment. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step—and these steps can be taken a few at a time—and celebrated all the time.