So last week I briefly mentioned that I’d signed on to a week (five and a half days, to be exact) at my old Secret Work-From-Home Day Job grading standardized test essays. The chance to pick up extra hours arrived conveniently in my inbox six or so weeks ago because I’m still on the company’s mailing list, and at the time I figured, what the hell—I could always use the extra cash, and a week of test-grading wouldn’t set me too far behind, right?
*Cue ominous music here*
The Basics
In case you missed my first entry about my old at-home test-grading job (which I’ll link to again here), here’s the gist: I used to work for a huge educational company reading and scoring standardized tests. Because computers can’t assign scores to the essay part of the tests, the company needed several hundred actual people to work from home, read each essay, and assign it a numerical score based on ridiculously specific parameters. And there were tens of thousands of these essays that needed scoring.
My shifts usually lasted either four or eight hours with set breaks, and required me to be logged into the company’s online system the entire time. Since reading the same. exact. essay. over. and. over. is an insanely repetitious task that turned my brain into soggy Lucky Charms, I realized I couldn’t ever do this job over a long period of time, though working in short bursts of a few days seemed more manageable.
Early on, I also figured out that as long as you kept producing a constant stream of essay scores—say, one every 5-7 minutes—no one would bother you about going faster. I also realized that the essays themselves usually took less time than that to grade (anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes), meaning that I could use the extra time for myself as long as I spaced it out between essays. If I alternated between grading an essay and working on personal projects while still on the clock, I could using my time effectively while still bringing in a paycheck—an ideal situation.
Multitasking Overload
My first day started out fine: I marked my to-do list with nine Low-Focus Items to work on during my shift and some Medium- to High-Focus Items for after the shift, and got everything done in time to do some reading before bed. The first day, by any standard, was a complete success.
On the second day I also marked down nine items to take care of during my shift but only finished five. D’oh.
On the third day I finished six out of nine of my on-shift items, then ran into some problems after the shift and wasn’t able to work on my novel like I’d planned, which then put me a day behind on that. Double d’oh.
By the fourth and fifth days I realized that my concentration was all over the map, so that by mid-afternoon I’d lost all hope of getting any personal work done at all as I bounced between Youtube videos, news stories, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. I’d also reduced my daily walks from every day to every other day, and was getting lethargic after forty-eight hours of not leaving my apartment.
The loss of my attention span happened so gradually that I didn’t even notice, but it was clear that after several days of test-grading I was having trouble keeping up my own work for longer than a few hours. It’s hard to describe exactly how this felt as my brain madly dashed between tasks, shuffling some in for later, forgetting others, and losing track of where I was as the essays, online distractions, and actual to-do items got hopelessly scrambled. That was pretty unfortunate, since being able to use Day Job time to my advantage was half the reason I took the job on in the first place (the other being, you know, the paycheck).
I also ended the week feeling ridiculously burned out and needing to get out of my apartment and away from the computer, and though this directly resulted in my going to see the awesome Mr. Rogers documentary and enjoying pineapple-strawberry smoothies with some friends, the multitask burnout was a pretty sucky feeling.
And Now the Bigger Question…Did I Really Need That Money?
I signed on to the test-grading gig six weeks ago when I was fresh out of the Office Day Job life and had just lost my steady paychecks, so even though I had a bunch of money saved up, I wasn’t 100% sure how the next three months were going to look financially, so a little extra cash in US dollars down the road seemed like a useful cushion.
Now, though, it’s becoming clear that my finances are fine, I’ve come in underbudget every month, and I’ll still have plenty of savings as I transition into my job in Japan. All told, the time I could have used to work on High-Focus items like my novel, studying Japanese, prepping for the move, or any number of other things is far more valuable than the money I’ll be walking away with—except I didn’t realize that when I started.
Maybe I signed on because I was secretly and needlessly nervous about having enough income before my new job started, a fear I developed during less financially stable times of my life such as my first year out of college when I could barely make my student loan payments while still living with my parents, or during grad school when I lived off eleven hundred dollars a month by buying all store-brand groceries, walking everywhere, and not buying any furniture. Those times not only taught me to how be frugal, but they also got me in the habit of scooping up work whenever and however I could get it so I’d have enough to make ends meet. Call it a base instinct or a defense mechanism, but either way, I learned never to turn down an opportunity.
One of my favorite finance bloggers Paula Plant likes to talk about how time is more valuable than money because we can always get more money but we can never get more time, and every time you go to work you’re trading a nonrenewable resource (your time) for a renewable one (your money). My test-grading stint formed a similar trade-off: I lost forty-two hours of focused work time in exchange for a bank account boost, and now I’m regretting that trade-off quite a bit.
Maybe this also happened because, as I mentioned a few weeks back, I have a tendency to take on too much, and I figured I could handle the extra days of test-grading. While I fully agree that it’s better to set your goals high, I’m learning quickly that not being smart about what goals you pursue can cause you to move in the wrong direction, so that even though you still achieve something at the end of the week, it wasn’t the thing you really wanted to do.
As my friend and fellow writer James Crews would say: you have to learn to say no.
Weren’t There Any Positive Takeaways From This Experience?
Besides the paycheck and the Low-Focus to-do items I was able to finish during my shifts, the one other benefit to my test-grading week was that I woke up every morning at a decent hour without sleeping in and found myself going to bed at the same time every night. Waking up was easy because I had a set place to be, so I actually saved some of my time by giving myself an external motivator that got me moving.
To sum up, this means that my forty-two hours of test-grading weren’t a total loss, and all told probably gave me a bit more productive time than I’m giving myself credit for, though it still wasn’t the best way to spend five and a half days. This is a lesson I’m going to keep in mind when taking on other Day Job work in the future, since I’m finally realizing that I don’t have to work jobs out of desperation anymore.
If you’re reading this, your position might be different than mine and you might very well need that money more than the week of your time—but the point, as always, is to take a hard look at your resources, what you have on your plate, and what you’re missing, then make a decision based on that.
Because planning out your decisions, rather than making them automatically, rocks pretty hard.
Keep in touch—we’ve all got our own challenges to work through…
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