Identifying Obstacles

Identifying obstacles early in working at home is important. Working with an energetic three year old running around is challenging, but not impossible. Luckily, I've noticed a little pattern. After breakfast the kiddo will watch a bit of TV and play with her dolls. There's an hour usually uninterrupted. Then another hour or two for naptime in the afternoon. After that, it seems like everything falls apart.

Working at home takes quite a bit of commitment, and I feel like I'm struggling to maintain. In theory, I should be able to squeeze out about five hours a day to work, but in reality I often fall short.

The biggest road block I seem to encounter is that everybody thinks since I'm WAHM I can drop everything at a moments notice. Frustrating! Sure, a few minutes here and there don't hurt, but getting through to the significant other that I need to focus my time while working has proven challenging. 

All this has just made me more stubborn. Working at home is my best option right now, so I owe it to myself to give it my all.  

Time, and lack thereof.

Now that I've been a SAHM for a year, I'm wondering how I ever had time to get out the door and get to work before. I have waivered back and forth between trying to make money online, and focusing on the house. It seems I can't find a happy medium.

I have really gotten out of the habit of checking out MTurk everyday. For a while I really got into a good groove with them, logging in at certain times of the day, searching out requesters whose work I enjoyed, and I was making around ten to fifteen dollars a day. Slacking off for several months, I'm finding it difficult to get my routine back.

One thing I haven't stopped doing was looking for the perfect work at home job, and I did stumble onto some opportunities on the WAHM.com forum. Because of a NDA agreement, I can't say a whole lot about it. But I passed all my required testing and am set to start working this week. I am so excited, but so worried that I'm not going to be able to juggle everything. Eh, I guess I don't know how it will work out until I try. :)

But becoming a WAHM vs just a SAHM, I'm just going to have to buckle down on scheduling. Work is work, and you get out of it what you put in. Maybe it will work out beautifully, maybe it won't. But if I don't take the chance I'll never know either way.

I am hoping once I get back into the routine of working at home that I can squeeze in an hour or so each day for MTurk. It's really nice to have that little bit of spare change for new books for the Kindle. 

When Good Requesters Go Bad on MTurk

Well Summer's here, and as usual not finding a whole lot of time to do MTurk work. But there's some valuable lessons I relearned this week when what was one of my favorite requesters posted a lot of work on MTurk.

It's really important to keep up with reviews on Turkopticon and Turker Nation. Even though I've previously done thousands of HITs for ProdUniverse without any problems, I noticed several forum posts about them rejecting tons of work. As in, the vast majority of work submitted. Most of the posters in the forum had sent emails to both ProdUniverse and MTurk and had heard nothing in return. Something is fishy with this. I did do 11 HITs to test the waters, so far all are still pending. I have enough HITs approved prior that it wouldn't put a ding in my approval rating.

It just goes to show how vigilant a Turker needs to be to protect their best interests. Why put in a bunch of time for nothing? And for those who don't have large amounts of HITs approved already, a big batch all rejected could wreak havoc on their approval rating, limiting what work they can do. I rebounded mostly from my big hit at Christmas, but it was a long hard road to do so. I'm not about to give ProdUniverse a chance to make me do that all over again.

All in all, I do enjoy their HITs. They won't make you rich, but they're easy time killers and the money isn't horribly bad. If ProdUniverse can fix whatever seems to be the problem, I'll be back. If they can't, I'll have to chalk them up to a good requester gone bad and stay away. Life's too short to play with scammers.  

***Edit: The eleven HITs I did yesterday did all approve today. I'm still not confident enough to jump in and do a bunch. Turker Nation is still showing several posters who are getting the vast majority of their work rejected from ProdUniverse. 

Summer Work

Summer is here, and I'm finding it much more difficult to buckle down and work at home. Between playing outside and tending the garden, I've slacked off on online work. However, I do still check in with MTurk early in the morning and late in the evening and still make a few dollars a day.

As with anything in life, you get out of it what you put into it with MTurk. The irregular checking in like I've done misses a lot of good HITs, but there's always transcription work to find. Which is good. Claritrans and Castingwords almost always have transcription work up to do around the clock.

Another thing I do try to do to add up a little here and there is just taking five minutes here and  there throughout the day to work a few HITs. Even if they're penny work. It does add up over time.

All in all, I still plug away with MTurk. So far it's been my favorite way to make money from home. I may not be getting rich from it, but it does give me money for gas and spending money. Plus, I know it pays out so I know it's worth my time. In about a year's time, I've made around $2100, and about half of that time I hardly logged on to work. 

More Zazzle

With some beautiful weather and flowers in bloom, I've taken this time to add more items to Zazzle. I spent part of this morning taking tons of pictures, and added several products today. I'm so excited to be working with Zazzle!


create & buy custom products at Zazzle