In a previous article, I briefly discussed working from home as an option for many moms these days. Here, we will take a closer look at this option.

Working from home is very appealing to many people. When you work from home, you don’t have a strict schedule to adhere to, you don’t have to pay for daycare, gas, and lunches, and you don’t have to deal with petty office gossip. It’s especially appealing to parents who want to stay at home with their children. It appeals to people who want to save time and money. Some people have an hour-plus commute to work everyday. Working from home eliminates that, and it eliminates the expenses associated with an outside job. Working from home is the introvert’s dream - no face-to-face contact with anyone, ever!

But even for an introvert, working from home can become a drag. After a while, people get “cabin fever” and they just have to get out. For a few years, I worked a part-time job outside the home in addition to my at-home job. That was a happy medium for me.

One must be extremely disciplined to work from home. In this setting, you don’t have to be at work at any certain time, so you can work whenever you want. Sometimes it can be extremely hard to motivate yourself to work, especially if the work you do is boring (like data entry). I never made a lot of money working from home because, I admit, I was too lazy to work a lot of hours. I made a lot of money per hour but my paychecks were never more than a few hundred dollars because I couldn’t bring myself to work a 40-hour workweek.

There’s a lot of distractions at home that you don’t have at work. At work, all you have is work pertaining to the job. At home, there is housework. There’s dishes, laundry, kids, and dirty bathrooms. These are all things that have to be done. How do you decide which type of work to do? What you have to do is, get into a routine where you set aside a certain number of hours per day to work your job, and a certain number of hours to dedicate to housework.

Your work can also take you away from your kids. Even though you’re at home with them, you’re not spending time with them because you’re working. You’ll have to be disciplined in this area too, setting aside a certain amount of time each day to spend with them. If you want to make a lot of money, you’ll be working so much that you’ll basically ignore your children. If you have young children that need to be watched, you may end up needing to hire a sitter anyway.

Telecommuting usually offers nothing as far as benefits, unless you happen to land a really good job. Say your employer offers you the option of working from home and keeping your benefits. That would be the best way to go. Usually, you’ll end up self-employed or as an independent contractor, which means no health insurance and no 401K plan. You would have to pay for these things yourself if you wanted them.

Working from home has its benefits and drawbacks. Do plenty of research before you make the jump. I worked at home for three years and now I have a full-time job outside the home. I must say I prefer the outside job to working at home. At first, I thought that telecommuting was a fabulous option, but after I did it for a while, I started to see the downside.

In my next article, I’ll discuss various work-from-home careers for those who might be interested.