by David B Hitchcock

Created on: August 22, 2009

Everywhere you look on the Internet are ads for working from home, control your own schedule, and free yourself from the chains of the office. What they don't tell you are that you will have a whole new set of chains if you work at typing jobs from home.

What jobs are typing jobs?

In decades gone by there were rooms and rooms filled with women typing documents. Then photocopies came, and reduced that number. Then computers came, and reduced the number of typists required again. However, there is still a need for people who can enter information into a computer quickly and accurately. With computers there are many other jobs that involve typing, suc/h as creative writing, some graphic design, report writing, essay writing, and web article writing to name a few. How time consuming are these jobs?

Time as a metric

A metric is a measurement of something. If we are writing, and want to use time as a metric you get things like pages per minute, or words per second. These are measures of how fast you produce your writing. It is also a measure of how fast you can earn money. This is important when you work at home because you only get paid for what you do, which might be differnt if you work at a company full time. You will be even slower if you need to do research or editing for your writing. And slower means less money.

What is your pay?
Often work at home jobs where you type do not pay well. The pay can be per page, per assignment, or whatever. But if you aren't a fast typer, you will not make very much money per hour. And you will often be competing against people in other countries with lower costs of living, such as in India where a person can live quite well on $300 a month. That compares to a typical person in North America with a 1 bedroom apartment needing more like $1500 to make ends meet. Its very hard to be competitive when that is the reality.

To sum up
If you are working at typing jobs for some extra money, thats one thing. If you are writing because you love to write, that is one thing as well. However, if you are trying to pay bills with it, be careful that you don't earn less than going to your local fast food restaurnt and serving up fries.

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