Working at home while homeschooling

[DragonFaerie]

For those of you who work at home, how do you schedule your day such that you can get your work done while still being available to educate your children? I have just started medical transcription training and plan to work from home when I'm finished. However, I'm feeling overwhelmed just trying to find time to study and complete my coursework while schooling the children.

 

Even though my kids work fairly independently, they frequently have questions or need feedback on their work and DS needs constant prodding to keep him focused and working. Also, I am pretty much a single parent so I feel the need to be available to the kids always. I've considered the obvious study times of early mornings (yuck!) and evenings after bedtime (good; I'm a night owl anyway) but that doesn't really add up to enough hours. I'd love some specific schedules or suggestions that might help me out.

[Mynyel]

I work from home. I struggle a lot between the two.

 

We are taking a break right now, but we start back up Monday. My work is solely on the computer. Aside from work the computer is a major distraction for me. So I have just made a rule for myself. If I am not working I am not on the computer until school, chores etc... is done.

 

I also get up at least 90 minutes earlier than everyone else and get 2 hours of work done before school is ready to start. That leaves 2 hours to get in the rest of the day.

 

It is a fine and tedious balance. You have to be majorly disciplined. You have to adhere to some semblance of a schedule. Otherwise everything is willy nilly and nothing gets done.

[Wildiris]

I work from home with my DH running an online retail business. The balance between homeschool, housework, and helping DH is a hard balance.

 

I chose to use K12 to cut down on the amount of time I spent pulling together a course of study on my own. It is a compromise, but a good compromise. Everything is done for me including a schedule and time line for completion. The daily assignments that K12 sets out for us to do in the online school, in my opinion, makes homeschooling possible while working.

 

I work 4-5 hrs a day for DH. To do this I made DD~8 a daily check list separate from k12's daily list. I work with DD~8 from 9am until 1pm, add 90 min. in the late afternoon if I can, and work with her on piano for 45 min. Not everyday is perfect, but this plan works. We do make progress is all subjects. I also add time to catch up on the weekend with DD~8 on subjects we may have fallen behind in. Her goal is to finish school by June 1st.

 

K12 requires that each student covers 2-3% of subject material a week. It doesn't sound like much, but when you fall behind it becomes a lot. I think this a one of the aspects of K12 that rankles many homeschoolers--the pressure to complete work in a timely fashion on someone else's timeline.

 

Finally, when I am not packaging for our daily shipping through USPS (2hrs.), I try to work either early morning or late at night. I've eliminated blogging, and cut back on non work related computer time.;)

 

I looked medical transcription recently, but opted not to do that thinking that voice transcription technology is moving rapidly. At the time my impression was the industry needed transcription workers with experience that could review the voice transcriptions for error.

 

 

 

[sparrow]

We now own a business now that is more flexible with homeschooling demands, but for the first 7 years of our kids' lives I worked full-time for a university in the IT department. 20 hours in the office and 20 hours telecommuting. I won't lie. It was very hard and I typically ended up working late into the night. I suspect that is what most work-at-home parents do :tongue_smilie:. It was also worth it :001_smile:.

[DragonFaerie]

I looked medical transcription recently, but opted not to do that thinking that voice transcription technology is moving rapidly. At the time my impression was the industry needed transcription workers with experience that could review the voice transcriptions for error.

 

I had this same concern so I researched a lot before enrolling. My course includes VR editing so I'll be prepared to handle that work as well as traditional MT. I also spoke with the Director of Health Information Management at our local hospital. She says that she doesn't see VR taking over the field anytime soon. Large hospital systems can afford to change to that system but most small to mid-sized hospitals continue to use traditional transcription because the VR systems are expensive. I felt much better about the future of MT after talking with her.

[DragonFaerie]

I am terrible at early mornings so I'm not sure I can reasonably expect myself to get up and going and work before school (we start school at 8:30). I am thinking of a couple of options, though. First, I may be able to work from 9 am to noon and leave the kids to work on schoolwork independently, setting aside problems and questions until after lunch. Then, from noon to three we can have lunch and I can check work and answer questions while they finish school for the day. I had already planned work time from 3 pm - 5 pm on most days, too, and if I still haven't finished, I can work again for a few hours after the kids go to bed at 8:30. I could also possibly fit in some time on the weekends when the kids are playing out side and such. It all sounds good in theory. I'm just worried about actually making it work, especially the part about working while they do school.

[G5052]

You're indeed probably looking at needing longer blocks of time early in the morning and late at night so that you can concentrate. Maybe you can put off parts of it for times when interruptions don't matter, but that will be hard with the type of work and age of your children.

 

All of mine is contract (i.e. "piece") work that can easily be done in smaller pieces, so homeschooling hasn't been a problem. Most of it is done in bits-and-pieces. I do have one contact now where I can't be interrupted for several hours straight twice a week during normal school hours, and we've done fine with that. My plan is to gradually do more of that.

 

The key though is that my children are older and having been working from assignment books for years. In a given day, they only need me in small bits to read papers, help with math, find a book, etc.

[DragonFaerie]

You're indeed probably looking at needing longer blocks of time early in the morning and late at night so that you can concentrate. Maybe you can put off parts of it for times when interruptions don't matter, but that will be hard with the type of work and age of your children.

 

All of mine is contract (i.e. "piece") work that can easily be done in smaller pieces, so homeschooling hasn't been a problem. Most of it is done in bits-and-pieces. I do have one contact now where I can't be interrupted for several hours straight twice a week during normal school hours, and we've done fine with that. My plan is to gradually do more of that.

 

The key though is that my children are older and having been working from assignment books for years. In a given day, they only need me in small bits to read papers, help with math, find a book, etc.

 

I understand what you mean about needing longer blocks of focused time. However, I am hoping to do contract work as well, once I finish school. Truly uninterrupted work will have to be done at night when the kids go to bed. I can easily do three or even fours hours then. I don't know how I could manage a regular work-these-set-hours type of job, though, unless I put the kids back in PS and I definitely don't want to do that.

 

Luckily, my kids already work from planners. I write their daily assignments for the whole week so they know exactly what to do each day. For the most part, they can work alone. My biggest problem is keeping them focused and working and not distracting one another. The MT course will take me a year to complete so perhaps in that time the kids will get a bit more mature and better about staying on task.

[jar7709]

We now own a business now that is more flexible with homeschooling demands, but for the first 7 years of our kids' lives I worked full-time for a university in the IT department. 20 hours in the office and 20 hours telecommuting. I won't lie. It was very hard and I typically ended up working late into the night. I suspect that is what most work-at-home parents do :tongue_smilie:. It was also worth it :001_smile:.

:iagree:

 

Yup, this is me. I've been lucky enough that my employer is very open to non-traditional arrangements, so I usually work from home. It's a consulting company, though, so I generally need to be available during regular working hours, even though I am technically a part-time employee. I have established a daily rythm with the kids (educational tv shows after we've finished their lessons) so that I can get an hour or two uninterrupted in the morning and evening for scheduled phone calls, and the kids are used to me excusing myself for a few minutes for the unscheduled ones. I also have one day a week arranged for someone else to watch the kids so I can go do site visits or stuff where they can't tag along. But, the majority the big chunks of time I need for report writing or research is done in the evening after they've gone to bed.