subject: Work At Home - How Much Are You Being Paid? [print this page] What do people who work at home do a lot of? We work long hours developing the most state of the art product or services. With all this work, do we even know how much our time is actually worth?
For instance, if you are having a conversation with a friend who works at a department store, they can tell you that the department store pays them an amount of dollars per hour for their time. Thus, an hourly worker has no problem stipulating what their time is worth. The same holds true for those who work on either commission or salary.
For those of us who work at home, it is a different story. The vast majority of us work more than an eight hour shift. Furthermore, we constantly think about our business even when we are not sitting in front of a computer working. If your business is one which you enjoy and are passionate about, it becomes even more difficult to determine what the time which we spend on the business is truly worth.
So why am I stressing so much that we entrepreneurs determine how much our time is worth? I am doing this so that you value your time, and become more efficient. Those of us who work at home can truly say that time is money. If we can become more adept with our time, we can make more money. With that being said, I have devised a simple formula which you can use to actually determine how much your time is actually worth. You just need to take your income for a specific period, and divide it by the number of hours in that period. I know that it is not the Theory of Relativity, but it is a decent start. True, this calculation totally overlooks the amount of time we spend thinking about work when we are not at our computers, in addition to failing to acknowledge our expenses. Nonetheless, it will do its job for what we need.
The one thing that I can tell you is that you will get a more accurate estimation of what your hourly time is worth if you measure it over a longer period. The reason why this is so, is because certain rare occurrences, such as a missed day of work, or a abnormal revenue fluctuation, will have less of a chance to bias the results.
Also, do not be disappointed if you realize that you are not earning very much per hour. This is completely normal, especially early on. Once you become more efficient with your time, you will become more profitable. As a result, you will earn more per hour.
Nevertheless, this is now your basis of comparison. You can measure your progress from here with an objective measurement. Over time, you can measure your work at home progress.
