I’m in the fortunate position where I work for a family member’s business, and work from home. I’ve worked for them in some capacity since I was at school (technically before I was allowed lol), and I’m now 25 so I’ve been doing it for 10+ years.
Don’t get me wrong, I like making my own hours (as long as I get the work done), and there are advantages to not having to deal with a ‘proper’ boss, but I’m getting quite bored of doing what I want.
I’m not sick of the work, I actually really enjoy it. I work in market research (on the analysis side mostly) and really like reading through people’s responses and writing long reports lol, so it’s not the job.
Weirdly, one of the things that’s started annoying me the most recently is not having excuses to get out of doing things I don’t really want to do. Everyone (family and friends) know that I basically make my own hours, so I don’t really have the excuse of “sorry, I’ve got to work”.
The other issue with working for a family member is I don’t see any way that I could quit (not that I want to, but further down the line if I did).
I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but I’m pretty key to their business and without me I don’t see how they could continue without significantly downsizing, and therefore losing a significant chunk of their revenue.
Plus, I don’t think I would want to do the same job if I didn’t have so much freedom with when I do it. I couldn’t imagine sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week doing it.
So, basically, what I’m saying, is it weird to just want to have a ‘normal’ job like working in a supermarket or warehouse?
Given I don’t work ‘full time’ in the usual sense, I usually do a lot over the weekend and on evenings, could it be worth getting a part time job, maybe just a day or two a week to add a bit of ‘order’ to my life?
8 comments
I think it’s time to spread your wings and try something new.
This might be within this business or in a new job.
Be open with your family member – after all you’ve both benefited from the last 10 years of employment
Define normal.
The grass is always greener…
If you are being paid at or above market rate for your role, they will be able to replace you. It’s not like you are disappearing, you could do a decent handover whenever.
Try a part time job and test the waters. Working from home on flexi time with a decent wage sounds like heaven to me, and probably to a lot of ‘normal’ workers. Like some one else has said, the grass is always greener. But it would do no harm to see how working a 9-5 retail job (or something similar) would work for you. Plus having the extra work would get you out of social situations 😅
If you don’t need the money, maybe do some volunteering?
Worked with a few people like this, They had literally zero inclination to get promoted, move on, apply for jobs, One left and worked as a postie and was happy as larry, another one went and did gardening.
Lmao. Go take a weekend job at a supermarket as a taster… you’ll be very thankful come Monday