Managing your home based carrer

Posted by Offer Tsuriel on November 4, 2009

People who work at regular jobs often ask us who work at home, “What do you do with yourself all day?” This is an exceedingly stupid question. Folks in 9-to-5 jobs seem to think we homeoffice types have lots of time to lollygag in our pajamas and watch soap operas. This simply is not true. We perform many so-called “invisible” tasks-such as scraping lime out of toilet bowls-and those jobs take time. Most days, we barely scratch the surface of all we need to do before, whoops, it’s bedtime again.
So, as a public service, to generate understanding between wage slaves and we pajama-wearing housespouses, I’ve drawn up a typical schedule for working at home. It will be illuminating to those who’ve never tried to operate a business out of their laundry room, and will show that we stay-at-home workers deserve respect and sympathy.

 

We’ll start with a forty-hour workweek and chip away from there. Telecommuters often work on weekends, too, but including Saturdays and Sundays in our formula makes the math too complicated. You wouldn’t want me to strain over these numbers and perspire on my pajamas, would you?
First of all, it’s not really a forty-hour workweek, is it? Most of us can do our jobs only when the kids are in school. The period between the last bell at school and your standard five P.M. quitting time is completely lost to recountings of the school day and the usual threats over homework. So there goes around seven hours a week. We lose another hour (or more) getting the kids to and from school each week. That takes us down to thirty-two hours.
Running the washer is a task we can do while performing other jobs, but there’s still all that folding and fluffing and hanging things up. For a family of four, laundry adds up to at least five hours a week. Down to twenty-seven hours.
Keeping the house clean takes a lot more time than you clockwatchers might expect. A conservative estimate is eight hours a week. And that’s if we forgo non-essentials such as dusting.
Allow an average of two hours a week for medical emergencies, appointments with the doctor and/or dentist, and visits to the vet. This varies from week to week, depending on whether the children insist on climbing trees and the dog insists on eating Tinkertoys. Down to seventeen hours now.
Many housespouses are responsible for keeping the yard mowed, watered, raked, and fertilized. Another two hours a week, and another argument in favor of xeriscaping.
Grocery shopping? We’ll go conservative and say we can do it in an hour, if we don’t linger in the liquor department. Fourteen hours left.
We lose one hour a week fielding annoying calls from telemarketers and at least another two hours yakking on the phone with family, friends, and repairmen. Down to eleven hours.
Lunch requires an hour a day (this includes wolfing down the food, which usually takes half as long as the preparation time). Six hours left.
Answering e-mail and playing computer games might not seem productive, but it’s a vital activity that keeps stay-at-home parents sane and in touch with the outside world. An hour a day-minimurn-goes to keeping our fingers on the electronic pulse of the Internet and to mastering “Sim City”.
What’s left? One hour. And during that hour, we must performn all the wage-earning work that’s accomplished each week. Is it any wonder we seem so frantic as deadlines near? Is it any surprise we end up pounding away at our computers at four A.M. on Saturdays?
Now that you have hard evidence that we are just as harried as the rest of the working world, I hope you people with regular jobs will think twice before asking a stay-at-home parent, “What do you do all day?”
You accommodate us this way, and we won’t tell your boss about the hours you waste secretly playing “Minesweeper.”