Here’s my sage piece of advice for the day: Don’t quit your day job just yet. Work-at-home jobs typically take a while to send out that first paycheck (if you missed the reasoning behind that, please check this article out for more info) and so if you leave your steady office job counting on the paychecks from your work-at-home job to kick in quickly, you could hit a rough patch. But there is also the fact that although the work-at-home job seems like perfection personified, some people end up really not liking it. Strange, I know, and I wouldn’t believe it myself if it hadn’t happened to me.
I thought I had it made. I had gone to school to become a medical transcriptionist (MT) but about 75% of the way through my schooling, I realized that I really didn’t love the medical world enough to deal with it day-in-day-out. Nothing against the medical world, it’s just that for me and my personality, it wasn’t a good fit. So I began the hunt for a job doing general transcription (GT), and was lucky enough to find a job as a GT within a week. Perfect! I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, using the training I had spent thousands of dollars to obtain–things were going my way.
A month later, I had reached the end of my rope. I was slowly going crazy inside. My husband came home each day at lunch, and for that hour, I was a talking maniac. I had no children (only two dogs) and the loneliness was incredible. When my husband got home in the evening, I almost attacked him, I was so starving for attention and human contact. He was always tired from a hard day’s work and not really in the mood to talk to me for two hours straight, so I was left feeling like I had been left behind by the rest of the human race. Part of the problem was that I would only leave the house every couple of days–when your job is at home, and you have nothing pulling you to leave the house, it’s easy to just stay home all day. I used to walk outside and blink about 10 times because the sunlight was hurting my eyes so badly. I turned a lovely pasty white color and my husband began making jokes about how I could pass as a sheet of paper.
I ended up quiting my jobs that I did from home, and went back to work in an office, exactly where I started out at. I now have a great balance–I work the typical office hours (Monday through Friday 9-5) and blog from home in the evenings and weekends to earn extra money. I get my social time in, and my personal time in too.
So my suggestion is, don’t quit your day job. You may miss it more than you realize. If possible, I would try doing some work-at-home jobs on the side (like I am doing currently) just to see if the job is a good fit for you. If it is, you can make that transition gradually. Just make sure to keep some human contact going even after you work at home in your jammies. You’ll thank yourself later, I promise. And if you do decide to make that transition to a home career, make sure to check out my blog tomorrow: How to Stay Sane While Working From Home.