Daily Distractions

I work from home as a freelance writer while caring for an Autistic child which means I have more distractions and interruptions than most. There are days when we get up early to get ready for the school bus and we have therapy Monday through Friday. This means that we have to leave the house for something five days a week. Then we have to do therapy at home as well to ensure that we continue to make progress.

There are a lot of challenges from day to day. The biggest challenge is finding the energy to keep going when I find myself so tired that all I want to do is sleep. The fact that everything keeps going up is my main motivation. I passed the gas station today and gas is $3.04 a gallon. That's at least $60 to fill up one vehicle and that's way too much money to spend on gas alone.

Therapy is scheduled so that even the one appointment we have at a different place is within a few minutes of another appointment at the main clinic. I do my best to run any other errands that we may have while we're out to keep from having to buy more gas than I would normally buy. Some days it works and some days it doesn't.

My biggest problem with distractions is that I have to work when works available when it comes to things other than my own articles. It was looking as if 5a.m. was going to be the best time to do this. I dislike getting up at that time of morning more than I dislike going to the dentist. Fortunately the school bus doesn't run until approximately 8a.m. and it's only two days a week right now or we'd manage to miss it at least one day a week.

Two days a week I have a few hours each morning to work and clean house almost uninterrupted. The biggest interruption that I have is my other half that despite everything is still here. It's more irritating to me to have grown people interrupt me while I work than to have a child that doesn't know any better do it. Why is it that when you work from home people assume that you aren't working and that you have nothing at all to do?

I can remember a time when there was a new porch being put on the place. Somehow I managed to run errands and get enough work done to take care of the light bill that month. I was exhausted those months that my other half was out of work without unemployment compensation to help us. I'm not sure where I found the energy but I managed to write enough to take care of the most important expenses.

Distractions now are because of stress and exhaustion. There are times when I have no choice but to work and those are the times that I am the least productive. I have a million ideas in my head but they aren't going to come together when I'm under a great deal of stress which means that I spend a lot of time staring out of the windows. During the coldest time of year it was a longing for warm weather, as the weather warms it's a longing to be outside.

There are a million distractions during the average work day as I continue to work from home. If I were at a traditional job then I would be gone during the day. The mornings would be spent getting ready for work and maybe getting breakfast since I'm not a morning person. The evenings would be spent making the little one dinner after she'd spent the day with someone else raising her.

Some days the distractions are so bad that I think I would love to move out into the middle of nowhere just to get some work done. In addition to Autism my other half has a heart condition and an apparent inability to understand that if I don't get any work done I don't get paid. I understand that I have some passive income at this point but when I don't have time to write I certainly don't have the time to promote. The more I write the happier I am because that means I'm earning more to ensure that everything is taken care of.

I'm happy with the struggles against distractions as I work from home. There are times that I feel overwhelming frustration at not being able to get as much as I'd like to complete done but other times it's all worth it.