Anybody work at home? What do you do?

My friend told me about a job option where she could do court transcibing at home for a fair rate of pay, and that has me very interested in trying to work at home myself. Maybe not forever, but it might tide me over until I can stand the thought of going back into an office again.

Now, the question is, what can I do at home? What do other work-at-homers do? Any and all suggestions are welcome; I’m not adverse to taking a little training to upgrade some of my skills.

I sell real estate from home. I have to go to the office periodically & of course have to take clients to showings. Other than that, I’m on my own. Best job I ever had.

My mother, a potter, works at home (there’s a studio in our basement), but I doubt that that’s a practical option for you.

I’m a tech writer. At the moment I work at home 3 days a week. I’m in the office twice a week for meetings, because I’ve only been there a few months. Within a year or so I’ll be able to stay home full time and just call in for the meetings, and maybe even move across the country if I want to.

Working at home is not easy. It takes discipline to actually plant your buns in a chair and work. It’s amazing how appealing cleaning out your closets can be when faced with that report you don’t want to write. I use a kitchen timer to spend 1 hr increments working, then I take a break and putter around for a bit. It works for me.

The other thing is that you lose the social structure of an office. Because I’m not there all of the time, I don’t know any of my co-workers. If not for my roommate and a couple of friends I could go for weeks without speaking to another person. If you’re a social person, it might make you crazy to not have that contact.

When I’m not at school, I do very basic web design and I am also the bookkeeper for a local mechanic, both very part time jobs.

Yes, you do have to schedule your work time and actually work during that time. Of course, you can do it in a ratty t-shirt and bunny slippers while listening to your music at whatever volume you like.

I have a student grant to develop a software. Also, I am an intern for a festival/event production company.

Some good ideas/advice here. I’m not a very sociable person, so I don’t think that would be a big problem for me. I’m semi-disciplined, but I’m very self-driven, so that might not be a problem (I’m hoping). I’m really burned out on the whole office atmosphere right now (the structure, the forcing everyone to do everything at the same time, the having people assign new duties to me every day just because I’m there), but I do actually like to work, so I think working at home might be just the thing now. Now, if I can just find something to do at home for money; hmm, I do have a web camera and an internet connection…

FWIW one of my distant kin trained at court transcription and now works at home providing closed captioning for television. She was thoroughly sick of commuting hassles in Pittsburgh winters, officie idiocies, etc. She really enjoys the work and it’s even more convenient now that she has a baby. She’s a military wife so she also wanted a skill that was portable through all those transfers.

I don’t have the least clue as the logistics involved, featherlou, but if you’d like I could see if she’d be willing to share her her experience with you.

Veb

I make $10,000 a month stuffing envelopes in my spare time.
(And if you believe that, I have a working Anti-Missle Defense system I can sell you.)