WORK FROM HOME : Mothers Work from Home

The 25 million American people who work from home ( including mothers ) perform a balancing act more challenging than walking a tightrope. Not only do they manage all their work, but they do so while confronting family intrusions, loneliness and a workweek that never ends.

For Othelia Cassidy, just finding enough time for herself is an obstacle. The mother of two maintains a food blog, teaches West African dance, volunteers, writes restaurant reviews and co-directs a dance troupe. On top of all that, she home-schools her seven-year-old son while keeping an eye on her one-year-old daughter.

She handles her responsibilities by finding time for her professional work at home job in between child care tasks. She sets her son up with projects while she labours at the computer in her home office, and she teaches him when her daughter naps. She involves him in her work too, letting him help her test out new recipes for her food blog. But she still hasn't solved the problem of finding enough time for her herself.

Cassidy has set aside one night a week for hanging out with friends, and one day a week she uses a "mother's helper" while she works, a friend's daughter who watches her kids. Sometimes she tries to get up earlier than the children just to get things done, but she laments that that rarely succeeds.

Erica Orloff, a mother of four and co-author of The 60-Second Commute: A Guide to Your 24/7 Home Office Life, concurs that working from home is not as easy as it may sound.

"People who don't work from home think I must have the cushiest life," she says. It isn't always so cushy, she notes, and to have a successful business you need to have a strategy to make it work.

Orloff has added up the hours she puts in and figured out that they come to more than the standard 40. Her recommendation: Keep a work diary for a week, and write down all the hours you work -- even your 20 minutes checking e-mail before bed. And do as much as you can with Skype and Webex conference calls, so you don't have to travel more than necessary.

Logging all those hours working at home can be isolating. Alicia Rockmore struggled with that when she started a home based business five years ago. Until then she always worked in a large office. When her daughter was born, she figured it was the perfect time to start a home business so she could spend more time with the baby.

Conversations with her very young daughter tended to be one-sided, and she craved interaction with co-workers. "Working from home was a huge adjustment," says Rockmore, whose company, Buttoned Up, helps women organize their lives. "You're used to the stimulation of other people and casual contact."

She soon realized she'd have to schedule some contact with other adults. She found fellow mothers working from home, and she meets them for coffee and lunch breaks. She also has a co-worker who comes to her home to help her out.

Teri Gault, who runs Thegrocerygame.com, schedules all her business meetings before 2:30 p.m. so she can help her son with his homework in the afternoon or go to his basketball games. To make best use of that time, she takes her laptop to the games and works during the breaks. She also sometimes sneaks into her home office in the evening if the family is watching a movie.

She integrates exercise into her schedule too. It may sound strange, but she finds that being on her cross trainer is a nice way to break up the day. It's not strictly personal time, though. She checks messages and calls people within her company while she's working out.

One thing Rockmore has learned is the value of setting boundaries. Now that her daughter is a bit older -- she's seven -- the girl has a full-time nanny. Rockmore has made it clear that when she's in her home office she isn't to be disturbed unless it's an emergency. Still, working there allows her the choice of spending more time with her daughter if time permits. She starts working at 5:30 a.m. so she'll be done when her daughter gets home from school. On Friday she picks her up at school, and they start the weekend together early.

Part of setting boundaries is keeping physical ones too. When Gault started Thegrocerygame.com, she kept her computer and files in her bedroom. She soon learned that that was a mistake. "When I went to bed at night, I saw the lights blinking or a fax would come in," she says.

Her company provides coupons and listings of rock-bottom prices at grocery and drugstores in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K., Italy, Japan and China. "Things would go beep in the night. I couldn't detach and get relaxed when it was time to go to sleep."

Now her home office is in a separate bedroom, at the opposite end of the house from her husband's office. It's practically a holy site in the house. Family members know they're not allowed to go in there whenever they please, and they're certainly not allowed to use it as the supply closet when they run out of paper, nor can they download anything on her laptop.

Gault has 60 employees and franchisees around the country who also all work from home. Being in constant e-mail and phone contact with them helps her avoid feeling isolated. So do the managers' retreats she holds every March, with massages and wine tastings. "We try not to talk work," she says. "It does a lot for team morale."

Still, the biggest challenge is not overworking. It's easy to hop on the computer before the rest of the household rises. The same goes for time after dinner and before bed.

"It's so easy to extend my work hours, and I feel guilty because I feel I should always be working," says Rockmore. "The other issue is, on the weekends there aren't any boundaries. I can walk into the office and spend a half-hour checking e-mail. I wouldn't necessarily do that if I had an out-of-home office."

By Tara Weiss, Forbes March 26, 2009 - http://www.financialpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=1431358

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