In the good old days when I moved from working at an office to working from home, I found it difficult to make people around me, my relatives, neighbors, and friends from other industries, believe that I work from home. All of them were skeptic about my intentions! Time flew by so quickly and the scenes have now changed. Now I remember one good commercial ad slogan in the 1980s for a TV brand: “Neighbor’s envy, owner’s pride.” Yep, it holds good for home transcription too these days. I too am caught in that “envy” now when people find me at home always in pajamas and with my work-at-home lifestyle at my home office. However, I have an inner feeling that I have gone bad in my day-to-day activities these days. Now after eight years of adapting into such a work-at-home lifestyle as a home transcriptionist, has it done good or bad to me? I am just evaluating myself here and trying to elaborate you how home transcription can make you lazy, good for nothing else!
After switching to work-at-home lifestyle, in due course I slowly started depending on the Internet for every chore that had to be done away from home; banking, shopping, paying taxes and utility bills and so on. Rarely I took my vehicle out, became very much environment friendly, thereby saving gas and money! Furthermore, everybody was within my visible range; spouse, child, parents. As the paycheck came as a direct deposit to my bank account, I just had to only visit the nearby ATM to withdraw cash once in a fortnight or so, as and when needed. Slowly, I brought the world to my home completely forgetting the outside world becoming a computer/Internet addict. Everything came within the reach, so why would I need to go outside? What not, even thought of hiring an e-tutor for the child to skip going to school, tried to win a bread online, and tried to get any other work done over the Internet that needs to leave home! For months together I haven’t seen my neighbors or said a “Hi” to them, and even forgot the names of some of the neighborhood kids; thanks to all socializing activities being carried out on the Internet and social networking sites! To my surprise, I even missed the sunshine for a long time as I skipped my morning walk, making me the laziest, which would have otherwise kept me fit!
Come on, working at home has only benefits; you are the most nature friendly person on earth saving fuel; you save the commuting time; you can work according to your convenience living to the fullest satisfaction; what is wrong in it?
Yes there is! In fact, when things turn bad, all these so called good things brought by the work-at-home lifestyle will start working against you. You will get dwindled yourself beating about the bush unwilling to go outside to find bread. Yes, I am a sort of in that state now unwilling to take up a 9-to-5 job, though plenty of good jobs are available for my credentials. The work-at-home job has almost made me a slave of it providing all the comfort that I dreamed of, that now I am trying hard to break away its chains tied around me. It doesn’t mean you too will be on the same trajectory if you switch over to a work-at-home career, but tell me, do you think work-at-home lifestyle would make you lazy and good for nothing else?
I appreciate your honesty man….Lots of truth in it.
Thank you. So I have another man on the same boat.
I have worked from home since 2004. Whereas I believe my habits and lifestyle have changed, I would not say that I am entirely against the idea of working outside of the house. My husband is a retired fireman, and during his final years of work, it was a great way to make a good living and be there for him. Now that he’s retired, he wants me to be mobile. So, like any career choice, you pick your poison. At this point, we’re willing to settle for slightly less money because he’d rather that I was flexible. That could change on a dime, however.
While I can see where the troubles lay, I am very thankful that if I do work from home, I have friends and family who will force me to go outside and enjoy the world. I like the freedom of the work from home schedule, which would allow me to travel as I would like to visit all my friends. I spent 14 years without a social life, I’m not about to lose it as soon as I get it back!
Well, all I have to say is there does not seem to be much self-discepline going on here. I have been a WAH for 10 years now and accomplish more then I ever did when I was working out of the home. I am able to immediatly, if I desire, cook meals, work on my yard, play with my animals or just prop open my chair and sit on the porch enjoying what is going on outside. I LOVE not HAVING to leave my house. Have you never noticed that when you worked out of the home you not only commuted back and forth to the necessary destinations like school, children activities and work, but you were easily detoured by sometimes hours making those unnecessary stops. Now, I do live rural so it does take a bit for me to get to town but before I made the decision to WAH I was spending more than 24 hrs/wk just driving. That is a low approximation since that only entailed direct routes back and forth to work. If there was a traffic accident or construction it may take me an additional 2 hrs..a total of 4 hrs sitting on my behind in a vehicle just to make it home at night? I just could not justify losing out on that much of life. Here at the house I work out 6 days a wk, including running up to 10 miles. My house and yard have all the improvements completed. I have hobbies, such as my gardening, star-gazing and spening time on the nearby lake and river. I do not need to be pushed outside one single bit. I actually get to stop and take in my surroundings and enjoy the nature around me. You could not get me to work outside my house again for anything in the world.
You invited a reply…. Instead of making me lazy it made me into a workaholic. I had to finally stop working from home, I was ruining my health. I could never do enough transcribing to feel really satisfied. I mean, there was not a good stopping point, there was always more work awaiting me. Good to have plenty of work, yes. Some home transcriptionists are not so lucky. But how to make myself take a break was the problem! I would work straight 14 hours a day, every day, and had no life at all!
One reason is home transcribing really doesn’t pay as well as working at an hourly paid job in an office, even if it seems you are making lots of money, is because it’s up to you to keep your computer repaired, buy all your own equipment and supplies and health insurance, and so on. One way to make it pay is to be very, very careful to keep up with tax deductions attributable to the work and claim every tiniest thing on your tax return. But that kind of tax return can cost you a small fortune to have done. I had it done by a tax service once then copied it in the years after that, changing the figures for the current year, but even so it took a day or two to prepare and that meant income lost because I wasn’t transcribing while I did the tax return.
There is one thing above all you need to understand about your own self before you try it–whether you will be able to do a careless job or not. I cannot stand to not check over everything myself, therefore I am slower than some others though I type extremely fast and rarely have to look anything up. But these patients are real life-and-blood human beings who may die if I make mistakes. I know transcriptionists who say they make $80,000 a year but you can bet they are just putting any old thing and sending it on! I cannot do that. This is the key to whether you can make real money or just sit there and say, oh, I work from a home office, brag-brag, but know in your heart you are not getting paid fairly for the quality of the work you do.
When you work in an office you are getting paid even if you are in a meeting or chatting half the day with your coworkers. You get paid even if the work is all caught up and there is nothing to transcribe. And the company repairs your computer at their expense and buys a new one when necessary, and probably will give you at least some health insurance at company expense.
Still, I really loved working from home for 23 years.
I started working from home in 2004 and this has provided me the most stability as far as generating income is concerned. In addition, I don’t have the added stress of having to punch a clock. I don’t have to commute back and forth to a job and sit in traffic and worry about getting dirty looks if I’m late. I don’t have to deal with catty co-workers and office politics. I don’t have that same stress anymore that I used to have when I had an outside job. That is something I will never miss. Has this made me lazy? Hardly! Since I have my own hours, I don’t have any set schedule and I have the freedom to spend time with my family, clean the house, prepare meals, go shopping, sit outside in my courtyard in the sun. I ride my bicycle 5 miles a day every day. I also walk about 3 miles three times a week on top of that just for the fun of it. So – no, this has not made me lazy, but I can see how it can if that is in one’s nature to begin with.
I am amused by the responses we have over here. Did I prick a beehive?
So one thing that I notice here is that opinion differs between men and women on our subject. Check the first comment and the rest. Am I right?
Dear Raj ,
I myself was in the absolutely the same situation – after my daughter was born I started work from home (to be able to care for her), and you can imagine with a baby and work from home how many goings outside I had – almost no!!! So now when I started work it was very difficult to switch to the other mode of life but I feel really good meeting people, so if you have possibility – change this! I reccomend you!
I worked at home for three years and I can totally relate. I almost had no friends or interests outside my home. I became depressed and rarely put on decent clothes. I’m back at my local hospital full-time and enjoying it.
So I have two ardent supporters among women.
I work from home doing medical transcription. Before working at home, I worked at the hospital in the nursing aspect and was around patients and co-workers all the time. I have been at home for 6 years and I can relate to both sides of the spectrum. While I do love my freedom of being my own supervisor, being able to run to the store or toss in a load of laundry or catch a special show that is coming on, I also miss the companionship of my peers and the socialization. I rarely go outside and only recently started forcing myself to dress during the day again (I used to wear pajamas all day or sweats). I found myself gaining weight, health declining, and having social withdrawal. When someone would want to come over to visit, I would make excuses because that would mean getting dressed and, frankly, once you start getting used to being a loner, you find yourself feeling ackward at the thought of mingling with others. I found myself staying home more because I was so used to not having to leave the house. I lost a younger sister last year and am so saddened by the time I lost with her the last couple of years by not going to visit her and making excuses for her to come visit me. To make a long story short, as WAH individuals, we owe it to ourselves to not become hermits and get out there into the world, if even to just walk around in a strip mall or park, etc. Life is short and precious and we should not waste it being holed up inside our dwellings! Find your balance because we cannot have our cake and eat it to, we cannot WAH and be social butterflies, but we can (and owe it to ourselves) be in the world and not just in the little world that exists within our homes.
I had worked from home for 25+ years. I worked while in the stage of labor when I should have been in the OB unit. I worked when one of the babies was only 24 hours old. I loved it, made decent money, always had a clean house and a family dinners served every evening. A buy-out occurred and I lost all my accounts due to restrictions placed on the physicians. I became an employee at a MT service. We were paid for production only. My checks were horrible. Are MT companies required to pay you for down-time?