Work From Home – Is It Really Easy?
Haul of working mother is everywhere in the modern Indian society.
Nuclear family, no dada-dadi, kaam-chor house maid, unreliable nanny, demanding hubby and uncontrollable kiddos! Office tension, work pressure, scary boss, fishy behaviour, peet-peeche politics and jealous colleagues…
All these looks familiar to you, right! And all these are so predictive and difficult to handle. Instantly one thing that comes to mind is – ‘Oh, how I wished I could work from home?’
Is this new funda of working-from-home so easy for a mom? No commuting, no cliches of fellow workers and no sight of ugly boss! Anybody could easily imagine how wonderful it is to work in jammies from your own study or even bed room.
No issues of reaching to office on time and no worries about back home developments; no hitches of nannies and the kids are always under the nose.
Are you the one who is connecting to these phrases? Do you really think working from home is as easy as it appears to be? Oh dear, think again!
I have been working from home for past one year as a freelance writer and a blogger. I am happy to be my own boss trying to manage my work and be around my four years old son all the time.
I might not have the tension of leaving my son in creche or handing him over to a careless nanny who might over look his dangerous activities or easily forget to feed him, but I face the other set of challenges as a work-from-home mother.
Sticking to schedule becomes difficult when you are seen around all the time. Requests from family, friends and relatives pour in who think ‘she is at home anyway’. The door bell doesn’t seem to maintain silence when neighbours peek in just to say ‘Hi’ and take up at least half-an-hour. Domestic help finds it okay to bother any time of the day ‘since I am at home anyway’.
The innocent breaks – “I need to go to loo”, for young ones at home are unstoppable. The train of thoughts are dead in an instance and takes some more time to resume to what was at stake on my laptop. “Mama can you play with me for some time; Mama I want to eat ‘this’ or ‘that’ for lunch today; Mama help me with my colouring…” and all these could have been easily avoided if I were to work from an office.
Sometimes, it becomes too strenuous to watch everything happening around you and resist from giving a damn to it. It could have been easier to leave all the home-work at home and rush to office to worry only about work.
‘You are anyway at home’, so the world feels you can fix stuff like a homemaker and yet work your way to success. Why? Because you are working with comfort from your home.
The change of work place doesn’t actually take away the pressure but only shifts the focal point! If you work from home, you actually struggle to get those 6-8 hours of uninterrupted working. On the other hand, if you work from office, the chances are that you think more about home sitting on your work desk.
What is sure is – it’s not easy for a working mom and definitely not easy for a work-from-home mom. So, think twice before you plan to game in your work with the comfort of your home.
Medha, queen of queensquill.com is a freelance writer, a full-time blogger, earns on internet working from home, lives for the love of writing and breathes for the soul of her life, her son. Say Hi to this tweety Mama among many tweeple @QueensQuill who has now started catching the pace of social media.
