Marketing with Mandy–Working from Home w/kids
I write full time and do it from the house with three boys running around. I’m always up for helpful articles on the subject. What are some tips and tricks you all use?
How To Succeed Working at Home
When you have kids climbing all over you.
By Dr. Kevin Nunley
I get a BIG chuckle out of experts who preach the joys of working from home. Magazines often feature a photo of a nicely dressed model with her full attention focused on a client on the phone. Her equally nicely-dressed child quietly explores an educational toy on the floor beside her.
That’s never the way it works at my house. As I write this from home, my 15 year-old is bouncing a basketball off the outside of my office, my 12 year-old is blaring her new Back Street Boys CD, the kindergartner has just let the neighbor’s dog into the living room, and my toddler is trying to climb onto my shoulders while attempting to shut the computer off.
Experts advise this isn’t the way a successful work-at-home business is supposed to operate. The professional home-worker is told to make clients think she is in a big, plush office in a mirror-covered professional building. “Never allow noise from kids and pets and never answer the phone ‘hello.’ Clients won’t take you seriously,” they write. Uh oh, I’m in trouble.
Let’s be realistic for a second. Of the six million North Americans who work from their houses, I’ll bet more than half have noisy kids, dogs, and unfolded laundry competing for their attention. Yet, studies routinely show work-at-homers often get as much or more done than those in the office.
