The 2008 salary survey results reveal that the number of HIM professionals working from home doubled, from 12 percent to 24 percent, and despite economic woes most HIM professionals saw an uptick in salaries with full-time medical transcriptionists reported bringing in $33,500 an year, making medical transcription still an attractive career choice despite outsourcing woes. The greatest advantage of medical transcription career is the freedom it offers to work from home while the greatest disadvantage of home transcription career is the distractions at home, though this con doesn’t outweigh the time and resources saved and the overall convenience of working at home by opting out of commuting daily to the office. However, tackling distractions while working from home is a daunting task. Distractions may be of different forms, it may be a myriad of household chores, screaming kids next door, visitors and neighbors knocking on your door frequently, ringing phones, whining pets or even the mailmen. Are there any tricks, tips or techniques to minimize distractions in home transcription? How to minimize those distractions when you work from home?
In this post, let’s discuss those tips, tricks and techniques to tackle and minimize those distractions on a day when you’re dumped with a truck load of work so that you don’t receive any negative remarks from your client just because of your lack of concentration on work. I’m a work at home dad and these tips are aimed at both work-at-home moms and work-at-home dads, if any! Mine is a nuclear family with myself, wife and my son. The more the members of your family, the more the distractions for a home-based business. The people around you have a hard time to conceptualize that you’re actually working when you’re at home on your computer, the root cause of your problems, and as a result, they will knock on your door for the smallest of the issues. However, if you’re a terror and a born disciplined personality already, you’ll have none of the tips below useful as you may not be facing the problem of interruption at all!
To begin with, the major distractions for a home transcriptionist will include:
- Distractions from within your home.
- Distractions from outside the home.
- Distractions from within your workstation.
- Unforeseen distractions. (Distractions that are in no way related to you but ultimately you are the sufferer.)
- Your own health or attitude related distractions.
Before we look into tackling those interruptions, for you to be productive to the maximum potential, schedule your day before starting the day, set targets and work according to the schedule. By planning a perfect day, you end up more perfectly than an unplanned day by doing all those unnecessary or less priority work along with the transcription work and then running around at the end of the day as a headless chicken all over!
Tips to minimize distractions from inside home
Distractions inside home can be further subdivided into:
- Distractions from family members
- Distractions from home appliances
Minimizing distractions from family members
- Make breakfast/lunch available for family members ready on the dining table before engaging yourself in work so that they can have it on their own before leaving home or once they are back home.
- Press the uniforms/clothes at the weekend itself and make it available/well visible for your family members in the wardrobe.
- Keep medicines etc., available for each individual alongside of the food itself.
- Keep everything like school bag/office bag/footwear ready so that none of your family members have to call you for help while you’re at work.
- Baby sitting if affordable can be made available to kids, if any, needing your attention.
- It’s obvious for you to have tons of errands. Errands (and window shopping) are fine in a home-based job for you to have a look at the world around you and break monotony but schedule them to weekend instead of spreading them out to the weekdays.
Minimizing distractions from home appliances
- Your desk phone or mobile phone will be your number one pestering home appliance! Use caller ID and/or answering machine to screen your phone calls. If the call is not work related or a real emergency, let your answering machine answer it.
- If you’re not aware of how to remove yourself from telemarketing lists, better clear your doubts and get your phone number removed from the phone lists of telemarketers. (Outside the US, register your names in the respective “do not call” registry of your country.)
- If possible, let your office/workstation be in a separate room and close the door. You have less chances of noise disturbance from the surrounding and from TV/radio/other home appliances if anybody else at your home is using them, and it brings the seriousness of an office that anybody needing to interrupt you should think twice before knocking your door. If you don’t have an extra room for an office, choose an empty corner, put up a partition between your work area and the rest of the house, so that the chances of you losing concentration are minimized.
Techniques to minimize disturbances from within workstation
- Perform routine computer maintenance.
- Always be in hide mode in instant messenger.
- Try to use twitter in batches or off when you’re serious with a truck load of work. TweetDeck helps to organize your followers and not to be distracted in the twitter noise.
- Unless otherwise an urgent reply is needed for any individual email, batch process all your emails.
Tricks to minimize interruptions from outside the home
I’m a heavy socializer especially on weekends but a strict NO to socializing activities in weekdays and working hours. Anybody knocking on my door will be shown a serious face or reluctance to speak while I’m at work. Apart from this, I used to try different techniques to persuade any loquacious neighbor knocking on my door and prolonging the talk, I’ll be reminding them and ending the conversation saying “Oh no! I’ve already got work until 1 or 2 past mid night, and if I lapse further, it would make difficult for me to get to bed even by that time!” Most of the times it would bail me out. Just another trick that I used to do is to put a big lock outside my door so that the visitor returns assuming nobody is inside!
Unforeseen distractions for a telecommuting job
Other unpredictable distractions in home transcription which are beyond our control (that I usually face) will be either power outage or broadband outage. Exactly the same time last year, some sailor off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt anchored his boat and ripped off the Internet cables laid on the seabed isolating millions from Internet and ruining the day for telecommuters in three continents. It seems future cuts are likely; see whose fate is in whose hands! Similarly an earthquake at some corner of the world will have our day spoiled. The only alternative with which we can tackle such unexpected situation is by having a second, relatively cheap broadband backup connection with a different ISP and a power backup.
Health and attitude related distractions
Since no one is there to boss you around, lethargy may step in. At such times, give in to some distractions for the sake of taking breaks. When I eat lunch, I watch those news channels to keep me updated of the latest happenings around me or the retelecast of a soap opera, and the short pause refreshes and recharges me.
Keep your workstation clean, may be allocating ten minutes at weekend can help you achieve this. Having some greenery in front of you or in your office room will help you having a pleasant mood.
Constant coughing while transcribing can’t make you concentrate on the job, a healthy mind lives in a healthy body. Hence, try to stay fit, take care of your health. Taking a five-minute break an hour could break that monotony stepping in and would help alleviate the chances of computer vision syndrome.
Okay, I agree, you can do all those humanly possible to minimize interruptions but what about those distractions beyond your control? How to deal with your neighbor’s dog barking furiously at phantom always? Bribing it with dog biscuits have made it even worse; it increased its frequency anticipating more frequent visits of mine!
Great post with lots of good tips. I just wanted to add two. Get your own lunch prepared or at least planned before starting work. I don’t know how many times I have wandered into the kitchen hungry and ended up taking over an hour for lunch because I had to cook something first and didn’t have anything quick or prepared ahead of time.
As for tricks to deal with the dreaded knock on the door, someone once said they answer the door with their headphones dangling off their neck, hair all messed up, pen clenched between their teeth and papers all askew in their hands mumbling about being behind in their work. That is something I am definitely going to try. LOL!
1.) Yes, it would be ideal if the lunch and breakfast are ready before we sit for our work.
2.) I have a short hair, but still would like to try this and see the reaction on opponent’s face! LOL.
I love the articles on MTs at home and how to increase productivity and lessen distractions. How do we handle people knocking at the door?
Thanks so much!
Tricks to handle people knocking at the door.
1.) If your front door lock is a padlock type, lock the door with a big lock hanging on the door and use the backdoor instead!
2.) If you are a pet lover, better to have a big sized dog and let it open within your fences while you are at work.
3.) Unplug your front door buzzer while you are work!
4.) Peep through the eyehole to identify the visitor. If the visitor is a nuisance, never mind and do not open the door. Later, if inquired, you can persuade the nuisance visitor that you were under shower or had your headphone on that you didn’t hear the knock.
5.) If the visitor is unavoidable, follow the tip given by Shelly above.
6.) If somebody else there is at home, let them handle the visitor. You secure yourself inside your home office with the door locked.
7.) Try permutation and combination of all these tips above and adapt the one that is successful to you.
Do you have any other tips?
LOL! I think you covered it all. I used to have a St. Bernard. She did a fine job at keeping the strangers away from the door! Some would not even get out of their car! I have used the shower excuse many, many times. I am now off to purchase a padlock!
Yeah, same with my German shepherd. However, other than it becoming furious on visitors, most of the time it barks into the air on some phantom and that itself becomes a trouble! So to have one advantage, you need to compromise with another disadvantage!
Nowadays, it has formed a coalition with my neighbor’s dog that together they make utmost noise purposefully anticipating me to throw biscuits at them as a bribe to shut their mouth!