Welcome to The Geeky Mompreneur, my very first podcast episode. In this episode, I introduce myself and talk a bit about what you will get out of this podcast. I'll also talk a bit about some of the reasons to work from home and some of the benefits you may get by choosing to work from home.
[powerpress]
Welcome to the Geeky Mompreneur!! This is the podcast especially for the work at home mother.
I'm going to meet with you here regularly and discuss every aspect of being a work at home mom. You'll learn about everything from how to launch a work at home career, how to market your business, and how to deal with some of the many struggles that work at home moms face every day.
So, let me start by telling you a little bit about myself. My name is Naomi Nakashima — and yes, as you may have guessed, I work from home.
I have two children, one is 10 months old and the other is 4 and a half…but I've actually been working from home for well over a decade.
I started working from home back in 1999. I had just been laid off from the radio station I was working at at that time, and I had another job lined up, but it wasn't ready to start for another three or four months.
Well, obviously I had to do something in the meantime — I couldn't sit around and not work for three or four months. But, what jobs out there are trying to hire people to work for such a short time that weren't seasonal jobs for low pay aimed at teenagers?
Around this time, a friend of mine was really trying to build a website, and she asked me if I would build one for her. I had this silly little Winnie the Pooh themed website that I used to talk about all sorts of things — today it would be called a blog. However, at the time it was hosted on Geocities and AOL and she loved it. It was nothing special, at least not in my eyes, but I had built it from scratch by learning HTML and I was kind of proud of it.
This was, of course, before there were affordable website builders and hosts. Way before Wordpress was a thing. So anyway, I told her I would do it for money, and she agreed. So, over the course of the next three or four months, I built her site for her. And whenever she wanted to expand on it, change anything, or move it, she called me up and I did it for her.
Later, when my new job started, I decided to continue working on her site. That was my first work at home job.
As technology evolved, I taught myself more and more about building websites, content management systems, and coding. By 2003, I decided to leave radio for good and go back to school for business, and I decided working from home was how I was going to do so building websites.
That was the beginning of what would end up being 15 years of working from home. Now, I didn't stay with website design forever. I eventually made the switch from website designer to content developer to ghostwriter to author coach, and now I work from home as a social media manager.
Working from home can be fulfilling and rewarding. It can fill you with a sense of empowerment and purpose. But it can also leave you struggling and lonely. Those of us who have been doing it for a while find ways to cope — we find chats and groups and other means of connecting with human beings.
I've been The Geeky Mompreneur for a while now. I had two blogs, Help me Naomi, which focused on self-care, struggles of working from home, as well as parenting… And the Invisible Author which focused on the writing and author coaching. Now, I've merged these two blogs together into one
And the name, Geeky Mompreneur is just as it sounds. I work from home, I'm a mother, and I'm a geek. My flash drive is a TARDIS, my stress toy is a Dalek, my phone charger is Darth Vader…
So, that's my story and how I got started working from home. Now we're going to work on your story. We're going to talk about how you can start working from home, how to find those jobs, launch a business, start a blog… how to avoid the work from home scams that seem to just popup all the time. And, probably the most important part, we're going to talk about how to keep your sanity through all of it.
So let's go ahead and dig in right now by talking about some reasons why you might want to work from home.
For a lot of people, working from home is a way to stay with their children. This isn't always the case, look at me — I was working from home long before my first child came around. So even though it is a big reason for me to keep working from home, it's not the reason I started.
Maybe you're tired of commuting, or maybe you feel stuck at your current job. Maybe the job opportunities in your area just aren't very good, or maybe you're simply looking for a way to make some extra money. Whatever the reason is, let me be among the first to tell you yay.
Welcome to the hardest thing you will ever love doing next to parenting.
And I mean that. You're going to love it, and from time to time you're going to hate it. My job is to help you get through the times you hate it so you can love it even more.
Now let's take a few minutes to focus on all the positives — we'll leave some of the struggles for another episode. Let's talk about the benefits of being a work at home mom.
First, and this might seem a little bit obvious, you get more time with your kids. Don't get me wrong, you won't have unlimited time with your kids — but definitely more opportunities to spend time with your kids.
Next, it's bye bye commute. Even if you work from 9 to 5, you're never really gone from 9 to 5. There's the time spent getting ready, the time spent actually getting to work, the commute back home, as well as the wind-down time once you get home. This means that 8-hour a day job you have may actually have you unavailable for upwards of 10, 11, or even 12 hours a day.
Next, more flexible hours. Now, this doesn't mean that your schedule is necessarily going to be the dream schedule, but when you are in control of your hours, it does mean you can take breaks whenever you need so you can take care of other priorities.
One of the biggest advantages to working from home is the sense of empowerment that it gives you. Working from home allows you to essentially set up your own destiny — it will give you a sense of power over your income and your future.
And, you can get out of office politics…I mean, unless you liked the office politics – then this may not be that much of a selling point for you. But if you're like me, the office drama, the gossip, the constant chats and idle noise all just got in the way of what I was trying to do. And most of the time, I would leave work feeling worse than I did going in. Working from home definitely gives you an escape from all that.
And finally, you may save money in other areas… Depending on the nature of your work at home job and the number of children you have at home (as well as their ages) but you may save some money on childcare, clothing, lunches, gas, and other expenses normally associated with working.
Now, are there any drawbacks to working from home? Yes, of course there. But we'll save those for another episode.
And that draws this episode of The Geeky Mompreneur to a close. If you loved this episode, please let me know by heading over to iTunes or Google Play to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. I very much appreciate it. And if you want more resources for working at home, come on over to my blog at helpmenaomi.com. Until next time!!
Bye!