I was recently talking to my friend, Laura, about the differences between working from home and working at a normal office desk job. She had quit her office job over a year ago so she could work from home as a transcriptionist and she has noticed a big difference in a lot of different aspects; some good, some bad.
One downfall is that as a transcriptionist, Laura is paid on production (per line) which means if she isn’t working, she isn’t getting paid! She told me, “I did work hard at my old office, but the difference there is that once the 8 hours was done, you were done, you know? And if you think about it, how much time do you spend talking with people, walking around the office, etc. I still got paid the same amount of money each day whether I worked 8 hours straight (not likely with interruptions and whatnot) or whether I worked with conversations, breaks, etc. mixed in. The big difference here is that we get paid on production, so we’re actually working for our money!”
I have worked from home as a transcriptionist myself (I currently work in the office) so I can state from personal experience that Laura is right on the mark. When I first decided to stay at home and study full time so I could graduate and become a medical transcriptionist, I was studying all the time. From morning until night, I was there at the keyboard, working away. And yet every time I compared my progress against the school’s guideline for how long each section should take (I was attending a study-from-home school that you did on your own time, no deadlines) I was consistently taking much longer than I should have been. What was happening?! I couldn’t figure out what was going on. And then one day, I decided to keep track, down to the minute, of everything I was doing. I realized by the end of the day that I was spending most of my day responding to e-mails or browsing forums or doing laundry, and very little of my day actually studying. Just because I said I was studying all day long didn’t make it so. I was lucky to be putting in two solid hours of studying, let alone 8-10 hours like I had thought I was doing.
Now that I am working in the office once again, I have realized what a relief it is to not be worried about whether or not I have my fingers on the keyboard for 8 hours a day. There are many great and wonderful things about working from home, but the fact that almost all work-at-home jobs are based on production makes it more difficult to earn a healthy-sized paycheck consistently. I am a very hard worker and I even tend to be a bit of a workaholic (just ask my husband!) but the constant mental and physical strain of keeping my body in the chair and my fingers typing on the keyboard made working from home difficult for me. It doesn’t mean you can’t work from home (far from it!) but it is definitely something to keep in mind the next time you are drooling over the prospect of working from home. There are trade-offs for everything in life, and this is just one of those trade-offs. If you are looking to work from home, check out my three part series) on just that. Good luck!