Working (at home), homeschooling, trying to find the balance!

[MissJorgy]

Hi all. It's been awhile since I've been here, but I thought I'd ask for some advice. I have been working at home as a medical transcriptionist for about 2-1/2 months now. At first I was working well over 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, because I figured, why not? I'm home! No big deal! Haha!! I got burned out very quickly. Now I aim for 6-7 hours a day, 6 days a week.

On the days I do well "at" work, I feel as though I shortchanged my family. The days I do well with homeschooling, I feel as though the house is a bomb. Or I am totally messed up because I'm running off of 5 hours of sleep.

I want to be the best at all of my "jobs," but I'm finding that it is tough!

Any advice?

edit to add: My kids are 3rd, 2nd, pre-k and 2. We use Sonlight and love it.

[JessicaS]

It can be really hard and one does have to pretty much stay very focused


I generally do HS stuff in the AM and then by noon anything dd has left is on her own stuff.

[JavaFinch]

Is there a chunk of time you can work when your DH is home? If he can be in charge for a few hours, then you can save that time to get work done, then try to set up some sort of schedule where you have 'on' and 'off' time. I don't know how you do it now, but to just try to work "ALL" day when you can and have it add up to 6-7 hours a day, even though you're not working "ALL" day (14 hours or whatever) it will FEEL like you did. If I worked at home, I would need very set on/off hours to keep my sanity.

[MissJorgy]

I do. I was doing 8-12 and then 8-12 per day, which often turned into 8-2 with lots of work in the morning. To save my sanity, I switched it to 8-2 am, which would be okay, if I could sleep in in the mornings! But so far I wake up right at 8, ready to go ... and then that makes for a LONG day.

It's the feeling of never having a down moment, I guess.

[JavaFinch]

That's rough. When I used to have a home business, I worked sometimes so late I heard the birds singing (almost dawn!) before I went to bed!

Hopefully others will have more suggestions.

I considered getting into med transcription at one point. I used to be a court reporter, so I was going to use my steno 'skills' (in quotes because I'm Sooooo much slower than I used to be!) to do it, but I guess it just wasn't a good time, because multiple things came up at that time and kind of squelched my motivation.

[MissJorgy]

Well, it's a new week ... hopefully I can make some small changes here so that it goes better than last week!

[jeffsdear]

I am a translator and provide our family's income. What is working for me right now is to school in the morning 3-4 and then work in the afternoon - about 5-6 hours. I'm fortunate though because my husband is home full time and can take care of the house and meals.

[Mere]

I WAM, but only part-time. I work two full days (8 hours) a week with a babysitter coming to the house, and then my MIL takes the kids for another part of a day. I have the kids do all their schoolwork first thing in the AM, otherwise it tends to not get done. I do as much as I can with them before the babysitter comes, and then she helps them finish up as need be. And of course if they need help with something brief, I'm just upstairs.

I feel like it's a challenge to get in 20 hours a week; there's no way I could do more.